


Path of Needles

by TARDIS_stowaway



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Fairy Tales, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-02
Updated: 2010-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-10 21:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/104700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TARDIS_stowaway/pseuds/TARDIS_stowaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with 'once upon a time.' No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Once Upon a Time, in a Far Off Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> For purposes of this story, ignore season 4 and beyond. My marvelous beta readers Gillian_Taylor and wmr improved this story immeasurably. Thanks!

_Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped  
to help you in their turn.  
Trust dreams.  
Trust your heart, and trust your story._  
-Neil Gaiman, “Instructions”

* * *

  
“Tell me a story.”

The Doctor looked down at the small boy tugging at the hem of his suit jacket. Humans really were amazing. Killer flying monkeys from space were swooping past the mall skylight (the Doctor would be able to get rid of them in about ten minutes when his makeshift sonic monkey stunner finished charging). However, this child had obviously grown bored of cowering alongside his mother and the other shoppers. Now he came to the Doctor, clearly the most interesting adult around, and begged for a story.

The monkeys weren’t having any luck breaking the reinforced glass. They also weren’t going away. They swooped by over and over, hooting and throwing rocks dispiritedly. There was nothing to be done until the monkey stunner charged.

“What sort of story would you like?” asked the Doctor, pulling out his glasses. Not that he was going to read anything, but it made him look much more like a proper storyteller. “An adventure? A space adventure with astronauts…no, better not try that, might accidentally say something your lot shouldn’t know for centuries. Perhaps a swashbuckling pirate tale? Just don’t ask me to explain what a swash is or why pirates need to buckle them. Or, if you like being scared, I know stories to chill every one of your bones. Ghosts, vampires, zombies, witches, whatever you like. Scratch that; no point in traumatizing you for life. How about a fantasy full of wizards and magical swords? Or a romance? No, you’re a bit young to enjoy the kissing bits. Maybe you like the classics? Hercules, Ulysses, Gilgamesh, Siegfried, Beowulf, King Arthur? Ah! You must want a fairy tale! What’ll it be? Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, the Frog Prince, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Goldilocks? Well?”

Throughout the Doctor’s babbling, the boy simply looked up at him, solemn expression unchanging. The Doctor’s gestures grew more and more animated in an attempt to get some sort of reaction. Nothing worked, and he wound down to silence slightly deflated.

“Bad wolf,” the boy said.

The Doctor frowned, crouching down to the boy’s level. “What did you say?”

“Tell me a story about the big bad wolf,” the boy requested, enunciating very clearly for one so small.

“That story has a sad ending,” the Doctor said, gazing off at something no one else could see. His shoulders sagged.

“You don’t know the ending,” the boy said in a voice that was not a child’s voice. The Doctor looked back at him sharply and saw something feral in the boy’s smile.

“I’ve got to go,” muttered the Doctor, standing. He strode purposefully in no particular direction except away.

* * *

Jackie Tyler embraced her daughter like they would never meet again, which, in fact, they wouldn’t.

“Sweetheart, you can still…” Jackie began.

“No, Mum. Please let’s not spend our last minutes arguing,” Rose said, clinging to her.

Jackie nodded into Rose’s shoulder. “This is the most idiotic plan I’ve ever heard of, but I’m so proud of you.” Her expensive mascara could cope with a lot, but Jackie could feel it beginning to run down her face.

“I love you,” Rose said, tears spilling over. “I’ll always love you. I’ve just gotta go.”

Jackie squeezed hard, lingeringly, then let go. She’d learned to do that at last. She reached into the stylish but very large bag at her feet and came up with a plastic resealable bag full of home-baked chocolate biscuits.

Back in the other universe Jackie almost never baked and, to be honest, that was probably a good thing for public health. Here, having a live-in cook to deal with most meals suddenly freed Jackie to realize that she liked cooking when not trying to put on dinner at the end of a long day on her feet. She’d learned to bake properly, and she intended to put that knowledge to use.

“For him. And you too, of course. Don’t let him eat them all without sharing!” The bag was nearly the size of a person’s head, but Jackie thought that it would be just like the Doctor to gobble the treats up in moments all by himself.

“Thanks,” said Rose, voice too rough with emotion to mean just the biscuits.

“Stop wasting time,” Jackie said, because she thought if this lasted any longer she might shatter beyond repair. Jackie blew her nose loudly. Rose nodded, kissed her mother on the cheek, and opened the door to the lab where the portal waited.

She opened her mouth and after several tries managed to speak. “Goodbye.”

“Be careful, sweetheart,” Jackie pleaded.

Rose nodded, smiled through her tears, and closed the door behind her.

* * *

“Are you ready?” asked the man who was almost Rose’s father. Almost.

“I’ve been ready since I arrived here,” Rose answered. “It’s not for lack of loving you and Mum, but…” she trailed off.

“I understand,” said Pete. Rose knew he did.

“Powering up,” announced Jake, flipping the big red switch with great gusto.

“Energy readings within parameters,” Mickey informed them from his station, not quite concealing a jealous look lingering from last week’s argument about who would flip the enticing red switch. Rose rolled her eyes a bit. _Boys._

Rose turned her attention to the doorway that, for the moment, still led nowhere. The tangled arc of wires that would produce the portal between worlds almost looked like vines framing a door through a garden wall. Uncomfortably aware of the awkward plastic bag of biscuits in her hand, she looked around for some sort of better bag or container. Everything she was taking with her (mobile, TARDIS key, jewelry to exchange for cash in case she couldn’t find the Doctor right away, photos of her family, hope) was stowed in her pockets. Less to carry, less to lose, but she couldn’t leave behind the biscuits. She spotted a basket holding a floral arrangement (good old Ianto, trying to give even utilitarian laboratories that touch of class), dumped out the flowers (sorry, Ianto) and put in the biscuits. That would do.

“Gonna miss you,” she told Mickey, laying a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, you could still see me again. You thought you’d left me behind over here once. If this works without stressing the universe too much, maybe we can make it a permanent thing,” he said, sparing a glance away from the monitor.

“I don’t think the Doctor would be too happy with more holes between the universes,” Rose said sadly.

“Yeah, well, what does he know?” said Mickey, without much force behind it. “Just take care, all right?” He took Rose’s small hand between both of his, squeezed, and turned back to his task.

The air within the wire frame took on a distorted look, like the air over a parking lot on a blistering summer day. The hairs on the back of Rose’s arm began to stand up.

“Void radiation levels rising,” Kara, Rose’s former Torchwood partner, informed them.

“Safe journey, Rose.” Pete caught her in a final embrace.

“Give ‘em hell, Dad,” she said. “Err, with this void door, make sure that’s not actual hell.”

“Trust me on this,” he said, earning Rose’s smile.

The shimmer in the doorway thickened, began looking milky, and then cleared to reveal a shining white emptiness.

“Portal open!” Mickey cried, triumphant. “It’s holding steady.”

Rose stepped forward, her every muscle tight with anticipation.

“Wait!” Jake shouted. “We don’t have a fix on the far side.”

Rose waited. An ominous crackling sound filled the air. The light coming from the doorway began to pulse.

“What’s wrong? Can I go yet?” she asked, the hand not clutching the basket tightening into a fist.

“I don’t know. We’ve got through into the Void, but I can’t tell if it’s coming out on the other side! Trying to get a fix now,” Jake shouted, typing at lightning speed.

“Well, find out!” said Pete, moving to a console of his own. For a moment the only sounds were the clacking of keys and the crackling of the portal, which grew more and more violent.

“Losing stability now,” Mickey said tensely. “It won’t hold much longer.”

“Radiation levels rising into the danger zone. Sir, we’ve got less than one minute until the time-space continuum starts to lose structural integrity, and we better not try this again,” Kara warned.

“Does the portal go through yet?” Rose practically screamed over the warning sirens that had joined the portal’s noise.

“Yes. No! Probably. I can’t tell!” Jake growled in frustration. “No fucking idea.”

“But it might?”

“It’s possible,” he said, not looking up from his desperate work.

“I’m going then,” Rose decided, eyes fixed on the doorway.

“Rose, no! If the portal doesn’t come out on the far side, you’ll be trapped in the Void. In Hell, Rose, and we can’t get you out. It’s not worth the risk,” pleaded Pete.

“I’m getting back to the Doctor. This is the way to him,” Rose said, and her voice was heavy with authority far beyond her years, maybe even her species. The light from the doorway turned her hair into a luminous halo. The others shivered and did not rise to stop her.

On the threshold of the portal she paused. “Tell Mum I made it. Make her think it’s sure,” she said, in a voice once more high and very young.

“Rose!” Mickey cried, but Rose never found out what he meant to say. The portal took her.

* * *

She stepped into the maelstrom. Wind buffeted her skin and pawed at her hair and clothes. Even after she shut her eyes, pulsing white light burned a hole through the back of her eyeballs and into her brain. Energy surged through her, savagely churning up her insides and sizzling through her skin. She tried to scream but wasn’t sure if she managed it.

She clutched desperately at the idea of the Doctor. She held up the mental image of him like a shield against all the pain that assaulted her senses and mind. He was the object of the quest, her one wish. Everything would be all right if she could just get to him. This was just another run for her life, wasn’t it? Except her feet scrabbled at nothing, and her hands waved through emptiness.

She was still clinging to her desperation to reach the Doctor when she passed out.

* * *

She awoke in a forest. Under her feet was a path made of glossy black pebbles. Surely it wasn’t normal to rouse from unconsciousness in a standing position, but she found she was no longer sure. The path wound off through the trees, wide enough for two or three people to walk abreast. The bare black trees stretched on as far as she could see to either side, fading into the mist in the distance. It must be winter. The ground under the trees was as snowy white as the cloudy sky overhead, though not a flake lay on the path. The world was so colorless that she would have thought her vision somehow damaged were it not for the intense crimson of her hoodie.

Improbably, the basket of biscuits still hung from her hand.

Turning to check behind her, she found a hedge running through the forest as far as the eye could see. It loomed far over her head, thorny and impenetrable. Where the path met the hedge, a wooden door filled an arched portal in the hedge. She tried the door and was unsurprised to find it locked. No turning back.

She put the hedge behind her. Drawing a deep breath, she set off down the path through the woods.


	2. Wolves and Travelers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose discovers that she is not alone in the woods. The Doctor saves a civilization and plays Scrabble.

_“One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.” _  
—Alice Carter, “The Company of Wolves”

_ “Only heroes and girl detectives go to the underworld on purpose.” _  
—Kelly Link, “The Girl Detective”

* * *

The Doctor brushed the dust from his hands and surveyed the damage. The temple still stood, and with it the Hoyromese civilization. The temple would need extensive repairs, but the builder’s guild had already begun to talk excitedly of plans to make it even more splendid than before. Teams of villagers were spreading flower seeds over the ground where the corpse vines had grown until a few hours before, checking carefully for any trace of the slick black roots. Life would return to the countryside, if not to the dozen people who lay in the temple vault while the priestesses stacked wood for the pyres.

Just another day’s work for Time’s Champion. (Since when had visiting a budding civilization and saving lives become _work? _) It was time for him to go.

“Doctor.” Despite the golden veil of a priestess, the Doctor recognized the speaker. It was Roa, Priestess of the Infinite Quest and second in command only to the High Priestess of the Shining Spiral.

“Divine Seeker.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep from fidgeting in his eagerness to get a move on.

“I have a message for you.”

“You’ve got everything you need to rebuild here. The world is your oyster. Better than that, because you’re ready for so much more than mollusks. I’d only get in the way.”

“I was not asking you to stay,” the priestess said sharply. “Only hear the message.”

“Go ahead,” the Doctor said, not particularly interested. It was almost certainly yet another formal declaration of thanks.

The priestess threw back her veil, and to the Doctor’s surprise her eyes were black with small specks like stars in them, revealing her to be in a prophetic trance.

“All who journey into the woods will encounter the Bad Wolf,” she announced, her voice oddly layered.

The Doctor stood very still, his face dangerously neutral. “Your message is late. The Bad Wolf has come and gone.”

“Illusion. As long as you walk among the trees, the wolf waits for you.” The glowing specks in her eyes spun like galaxies.

The Doctor chose to answer overly literally. “Actually, I was planning to travel to a grassland next.”

“The woods stretch to the farthest reaches of time and space. Every day of living is a journey through the wolf’s domain.”

“I’ve seen the farthest reaches of time and space. No wolf, not any more. I’m going now,” he announced, spinning around fast enough to swirl his coat out dramatically. He strode towards the TARDIS.

“Can’t you hear the howling?” the priestess cried after him.

The Doctor paused but did not turn around. “That’s the wind. Storm winds shaking the trees, nothing more. The forest is empty.” He started walking again, shoulders hunched like an old man.

“You might not see the wolf, but the wolf sees you,” murmured the priestess. The Doctor did not look back at her as he went to the TARDIS and shut the door.

* * *

She walked. The path sometimes wound, sometimes climbed hills or threaded through ravines, but the fundamental view did not change. Squat black trees with naked branches, black pebbles on the path, white snow, white mist, white sky. No birds sang. No squirrels leapt through the branches.

So this was hell. Rose chewed her lip thoughtfully. Didn’t seem much like hell to her. It was creepy, she gave it that, but she’d seen worse. Krop Tor was the most obvious example with its monstrous black hole and plotting Beast underground. However, her personal version of hell looked like two places.

First was the church in 1987 where she waited for the Reapers to end the world and watched the Doctor die because of her foolish, loving mistake. (The old saying about good intentions and what road they paved was terribly true). Her other hell was Norway. Beautiful country, Norway, full of kindhearted people, but she had utterly forsaken hope there. Eventually, back in England, her family had led her back from the abyss. She learned how to live earthbound as if she were learning a foreign language. Eventually, her heart began to scab over. With her family’s love, she had begun to hope. With hope, a way had opened, or so it had seemed at the time.

This place was not hell, she decided. She was on a path, and paths went somewhere. Perhaps her goal. To journey was to hope. She walked.

* * *

Her shoes’ crunching against the gravel was the loudest sound by far. The next loudest was her breathing. It was possible those were the only real sounds. It was possible she only imagined the whispering from the trees. After all, she could see no living creature to make the whispers. They were so soft they might have been wind in the branches (but no breeze stirred her hair) or maybe nothing at all.

Possible, but she didn’t think so. Something whispered in the woods. No matter how she strained, even pausing to listen without the distraction of her footfalls, she couldn’t make out the words. Nevertheless, she knew with a certainty that crept up her spine like spiders that the whispers were hostile.

The whispers chilled her far more than the mist. She could not stand the almost-silence.

“The woods are just trees, and trees are just wood,” she sang a half-remembered song, but the sound of her own voice seemed flat and weak. Worse, the whispers seemed to grow louder underneath her song, always just at the edge of her hearing.

She walked faster, deliberately crunching the gravel under her feet as loudly as she could.

* * *

She came to a crossroads.

She had been walking for a long time. (How long? Hours? Days? She had a feeling the lack of change in the light didn’t mean much here.) Just as she was beginning to reconsider her opinion that paths had to go somewhere, the view ahead revealed an unprecedented sight. The path split in two. She hurried towards the split, thrilled at the prospect of any difference.

Of course there were no signs telling where the paths at the y-shaped intersection went. The choices were equally wide and shared the same black pebbles underfoot. Both ran levelly as far as she could see through the same black and white forest, and neither showed any indication of heading anywhere interesting. In another place, she would have comforted herself with the notion that if she went a little ways on one and didn’t like it she could always return to the crossroads and take the other path, but she knew with the illogical, unshakable certainty of dreams that a choice made here was binding. When she picked a path, she would walk it to its end.

Lacking adequate information from her other senses, she decided to try her nose. At the base of one path, she sniffed. Soil, snow…not much to smell. Making sure she didn’t miss a thing, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.

“Will you take the path of needles or the path of pins?” asked a voice. She jumped like a startled rabbit.

A hooded figure stepped out from amidst the trees. It walked barefoot on the cold ground, its graceful tread making not the slightest sound. When it stood a few paces in front of her, it drew back the hood of its cloak.

Rose drew in a sharp breath. She knew that pale face, those wild eyes, that calm, predatory smile. It was the werewolf that had attacked Queen Victoria.

“What are you doing here?” she asked it, practiced force of will keeping her voice and gaze level.

“I am asking you a question,” it drawled. “Will you take the path of needles or the path of pins?”

“What does that mean?”

“It is a choice you must make. Two roads, but you can only walk one. Which?” Aside from its lips and the slight movements of its breath, the werewolf stood utterly still. Somehow that stillness spoke more of danger than any circling or stalking.

“Which one takes me to the Doctor?” Rose countered.

“Both travel through the woods. Consider: the path of needles, the path of pins,” as it spoke it gestured, indicating Rose’s left as the path of needles and her right as the path of pins. “Or you could always go off the path.” The werewolf chuckled softly at this last idea.

Rose dared a glance at the trees, where the whispering seemed to grow slightly louder. She shook her head, not liking that choice in the slightest.

“What are you doing here, anyway? You died, no Void involved,” she said.

“I am the Bad Wolf,” it said, as if that explained everything.

“No you’re not! The Doctor told me how when I opened the TARDIS I sort of merged with the Time Vortex and called myself the Bad Wolf. Don’t remember much of it myself, but I know the Bad Wolf’s me.”

“Yes,” said the werewolf. “That is true.”

“So what are you, then?”

“The moon seems to shine, but its shine, its beautiful shine, is just a reflection of the sun,” the werewolf proclaimed enigmatically.

“I don’t understand,” said Rose, although somewhere in her deepest heart she thought she might feel the answer burning.

The werewolf chuckled again. Rose decided that chuckle was much worse than the howling she’d heard from it in Scotland. It made the hair on her body stand on end. “We have strayed. You must still choose a path.”

“Path of needles or path of pins, I know. Those both sound so, so…pointy. Isn’t there a path of sofas or a path of pillows or something? How about the road less traveled by? Or the path of least resistance?”

“You choose your path, but the paths also choose you. Now, make your choice. There’s more in these woods than just wolves. Perhaps.”

Rose considered. What did those names mean? Both were sewing tools. Both hurt if you pricked yourself with them. Both were small and metal. What was the difference? Pins were temporary. They held fabric together for a little while until a more permanent binding could be added. Needles could pull thread to bind things together permanently. She wanted to get back to the Doctor forever, not just a two-minute visit like in Norway. There. That reasoning made about as much sense as anything here.

“I’m taking the path of needles,” she announced.

“Interesting,” said the wolf ambiguously. “Walk boldly, then.” It inclined its head politely and turned its back on her.

“Thanks,” said Rose. Some deep-seated instinct for hospitality prompted her to blurt out, “Would you like a biscuit?”

The werewolf turned back towards her. Its eyes were very large, very dark, and very, very inhuman. Rose shivered.

“Yes,” the werewolf said, stepping closer and extending its hand. “Please.”

Rose reached into her basket and fought the impulse to back away. She placed the biscuit into the werewolf’s long-nailed hand (_and just what was that under its nails? Pray that it’s only dirt. _) The werewolf bit the biscuit and chewed thoughtfully.

“Very tasty. For your kindness, a word of advice: beware the woodcutters,” it said with a toothy smile that turned blood to ice water. Its tongue flicked out to lick a crumb from its lips. Then it slipped off the path, through the trees, and was gone.

Rose drew her crimson hoodie close around herself and started down the path of needles.

* * *

The Doctor heard Martha’s footsteps coming into the control room, but he didn’t slide out from the guts of the console until she called to him.

“Doctor? You got a moment?”

“Oh, a moment, is it? I have all the moments you could ever need. Perk of being a Time Lord, you know. Important moments, inconsequential moments, all on sale two for the price of one as soon as the TARDIS is fixed,” he babbled, extracting himself from the TARDIS. He attempted to wipe grease from his chin but only ended up smearing it.

“I’m bored,” Martha complained.

The Doctor’s nose wrinkled in disbelief. “Bored? In the TARDIS?”

“Yeah. We’ve been parked here for a two days and we’ve still got another two before you say we can go.”

“Actually, there’s only 46.5 hours left on the repair cycle,” he informed her.

“That’s still quite a lot of time sitting around the vortex doing nothing.”

“Weren’t you worried the other day that you were falling behind in your studies? You can use this time to study your medical textbooks!” he suggested, pleased with his problem-solving ability.

“What do you think I’ve been doing for the past two days with you burrowed in that engine?” Martha looked exasperated. “Study time is great, but I just need a little break. You want to play a board game or something?”

The Doctor thought longingly of his maintenance project and the solitude it offered, but Martha was making big pleading eyes at him. Big pleading eyes, he decided, were his kryptonite. Martha’s weren’t quite as potent as some he had known (_don’t think about Norway_), but they were more than strong enough.

“Thinking of something in particular, or shall I choose?” he said, locating a rag to wipe off his hands.

“Oh, no you don’t. You’ll pick some obscenely complicated alien game and then forget to explain half the rules until the game is well underway and I have no chance of catching up. We’re playing my favorite game from Earth. Scrabble.”

The Doctor dropped his annoyance at Martha’s belief that he’d pick an unfair game and lit up like a killer Christmas tree.

“Scrabble? Doctor Jones, you’re _on_. Race you to the game room!” He shoved off from the console and sprinted away. Martha laughed and took off after him, jostling in the narrow space of the corridors.

When the game was set up and Martha had firmly reminded the Doctor that they were playing with twenty-first century rules and dictionaries, they drew letters. The Doctor shook the bag as enthusiastically as a child and laid the tiles out on the rack. As soon as he saw the tiles, all the bubbly enthusiasm drained from his eyes like somebody had pulled a plug. The tiles read:

D L O W B F A

Being a genius, he didn’t have to think to know how they rearranged.

“Doctor? Is something wrong?” asked Martha, catching the sudden temperature drop.

“Hmm? What could be wrong? Unless you count the fact that you are about to receive the beating of your life.” He pasted a smile on his face.

“You just looked, I don’t know, almost like you’d seen a ghost.” Martha tilted her head and looked at him with concern.

“What? No ghost. Just a coincidence in my letters.” Before Martha could ask anything else, he lay down the word BLOW. He could have scored better for “flow,” but that was “wolf” rearranged. Besides, it would be polite to go easy on Martha, who was, after all, only human. “Your turn, Martha.”

Martha frowned at her tiles. She rearranged them on her rack a few times. Eventually she picked up three of her tiles. Building down from the Doctor’s W, she added her own OLF.

“We’ve got a theme going! It’s like the big bad wolf come to blow the house down on the three little pigs,” Martha announced, pleased. “The L’s on a triple-letter score, so twelve points for me.”

The Doctor opened his mouth and began to speak. He spent the rest of the game babbling while wearing his thin-lipped smile that tended to slip when he thought Martha wasn’t looking. He thought about chance and its tendency to seemingly create patterns that always failed in the end.

* * *

Rose didn’t know how long it had been since she met the werewolf. A long time. The light grew neither brighter nor dimmer. No other landmarks appeared. The only detectable change in anything was the increased pain in her feet. She ignored it.

She came to a place where the path bent particularly sharply. She could see the other side of the bend across a thin band of wood, maybe twenty yards across, while the path traveled at least three times that distance to reach the same point. What harm could it do to go cross-country?

She stepped to the edge of the path and stopped. She couldn’t do it. The whispers from the trees grew louder and more hostile when she seemed about to step off the edge of the path.

She might have left the path in spite of the whispers, but there was something wrong with the trees themselves. They were far too uniform. They seemed to come in two basic types: the first taller, slenderer, smoother; the second squatter, more rotund, lumpy-barked. However, not a single tree had the quirks of crooked branches, leaning trunk, old storm damage, or any other individualized identity. Furthermore, the small twigs at the ends of branches were not as tangled and intricate as she remembered from trees on Earth.

They were not so much trees as the _idea_ of trees. A child’s drawing of trees. A very disturbed child’s drawing of trees. Their branches reached out like grasping arms frozen in mid-grab.

Rose did not dare put herself underneath those trees. She took the long way around.

* * *

She heard hoofbeats.

They approached her from behind, moving very quickly for a horse. She stepped over to the edge of the path and waited, wishing she dared leave the path to find a more secure spot to observe what approached.

A horse so pale it could have been sculpted from the fog hurtled towards her with a menacing dark figure astride. A hood kept Rose from seeing the figure’s face. When the horse drew level with her, it startled her by rearing. She screamed as its hooves churned the air terrifyingly close to her head.

Trying to scoot away from the hooves while staying on the path, she heard a scraping as the towering rider unsheathed a sword. She dodged and wove as the figure swung the sword at her. She couldn’t get around the horse to escape. Then she put her foot down wrong and stumbled hard.

She cried out in terror, knowing that the stumble could mean death. She fell forward, catching herself against the horse’s flank. One wrist brushed the leg of the rider.

“Rose?” said a familiar voice badly out of context.

She looked up and for the first time was able to discern the face of the horseman.

“Jack? What the hell do you think you’re doing with that sword?” she asked, sidling away from him, not yet trusting the change in her vision. Jack hurried to sheath the sword and throw back his hood.

“I thought…I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Oh, so you just try to kill random strangers,” Rose bit back, still shaken. Yet she hadn’t recognized him either. He’d seemed too large, strange and threatening, wrapped in shadow like a Nazgul. What was going on here?

“My eyes were playing tricks on me. When I first saw you, you didn’t even look human. I looked at you and saw a wolf. You even howled. God, Rose, I’m sorry.” Jack was pale. He looked as shaken as Rose felt. She took a few deep breaths and felt her racing pulse slow. Somehow, this was really Jack.

“’S okay. I didn’t recognize you either. What’s going on?” she asked, wide brown eyes no longer accusing.

“This place operates under different rules. You can’t trust your eyes.” Jack swung a leg over the horse and dropped gracefully to the ground. “The heart is more trustworthy, even if I can hardly believe it when it tells me I’ve finally found you, here of all the damned places.”

Then they were in each other’s arms, holding tight like shipwrecked sailors to a floating beam. Rose leaned against him, feeling safe for the first time since she stepped into the Void, maybe even since the walls closed between her and the Doctor.

She had been so sure Jack was dead. Why else would the Doctor have left him on the Game Station and never even visited? Yet here he was, warm and solid if oddly dressed. He wore a blue padded doublet over a puffy white shirt, dark blue breeches, tall black boots, and a midnight blue hooded cloak that swung down to his knees. Strange, but it matched the horse. Rose wasn’t complaining.

It was Jack who broke apart first, gently pushing Rose away to arms’ length but keeping his hands on her shoulders as if afraid she would vanish if he broke contact entirely.

“I don’t have much time. What are you _doing_ here?” he asked.

“I’m trying to get back to the Doctor,” she said, telling him briefly about the Battle of Canary Wharf, working in Torchwood in the other universe, and the doorway that was supposed to take her across the Void but only dropped her within it.

“I’ve been walking through this forest ever since. I don’t know if this path will take me back to the Doctor, but when I think about going cross-country…”

“_Don’t_ leave the path,” Jack interrupted, looking horrified.

“Yeah, I sort of figured that. It’s dangerous on the path too, though. I met a werewolf.”

“And what did it say to you, Little Red?” he asked, fondly fingering the scarlet fabric of her hoodie.

“It asked me if I was taking the path of needles or the path of pins,” Rose said. At Jack’s inquiring eyebrow raise, she added, “I chose the path of needles, whatever that means.”

“Needles, eh? Luckily for you, I’ve done some study of folklore. You’d be surprised how many legendary dangers have a basis in real nasties, and sooner or later they turn up in Cardiff. In some of the older versions of Little Red Riding Hood, a werewolf at the crossroads asks her that same question. The path of pins symbolized maidenhood. A girl might help pin a garment that her mother would sew. Needles, in contrast, represent womanhood and sexual maturity. Think about the thread entering the eye of the needle,” he explained, leering at her good-naturedly. Rose’s eyes widened as she recognized the old-fashioned innuendo.

“So I’m stuck in some reenactment of Little Red Riding Hood. I’ve even got the basket of food. Great. You want to follow along and be the handsome huntsman to save me?” she asked, covering her unease with a cheeky smile.

“In the old versions, the ones with the paths of needles and pins, there’s no huntsman. He was added later by male writers who couldn’t believe a woman could take care of herself. In some of the old versions Little Red escapes by herself. Of course, frequently she has to strip first when the wolf asks her to throw her clothes into the fire…”

“Some of the versions? What about the others?” Rose asked sharply.

“Sometimes the wolf eats her and she dies.”

“Oh.”

“Believe me, Rose, I’d help you if I could, but I’ll have to leave soon,” Jack said.

“Why? And how did you get here in the first place?”

“I’m here because I’m dead,” he told her evenly. Rose’s eyes widened in shock. Dead? He was standing right there, warm and breathing…but this was not the real world. Maybe it was some sort of afterlife. She lunged forward, wrapping Jack in her embrace again.

“Oh, Jack. I always worried that was why the Doctor left the Game Station without you, but I’d hoped… I’m so sorry. At least I got those bastards. I killed the Dalek Emperor, Jack. Just a little too late.” Her tears soaked into the wool of Jack’s cloak.

“Whoa there. Calm down. You’re talking about the Game Station? I haven’t been dead from that for a long time,” Jack said, stroking her hair.

“What?” Rose asked, peering up at him through moist lashes, completely puzzled.

“I can’t die, Rose. Well, I die, but I don’t stay dead. Ever since the Game Station. When I wake up I only remember blackness, but every time I die I end up in these woods while I’m dead there. I’m always riding down this path, always searching.” Jack’s eyes took on a distant look.

Jack hadn’t been able to die since the Game Station. Had the Doctor done something to him and left? Why would he do that? What had happened to Jack? A suspicion both wondrous and terrible whined and panted at the door to her mind, but she didn’t let it in just yet.

Rose wiped her face with the back of her hand and even smiled a little. “Searching for why you’re dressed for a trip to the Renaissance?”

“Hey! I like the cloak,” Jack said, disengaging himself from Rose’s arms and giving his cloak a good swish. “Makes me look rather dashing, don’t you think?” He flashed a gleaming Hollywood smile.

“Very Prince Charming. You’ve got the white horse and everything,” Rose assured him.

“Thank you, my lady.” He bowed. “As it turns out, I’m looking for the owner of the other one of these.” Jack reached into his horse’s saddlebags and pulled out a shoe.

It was a gorgeous formal shoe with a low heel, made entirely out of shimmering gold fabric. It was also so tiny it looked like a child’s shoe. Rose burst into laughter.

“You’re looking for Cinderella?” she gasped.

Jack looked at the shoe in dismay. “Whoops. That wasn’t what I meant to grab.”

He rummaged around in the saddlebag for while. Finally he produced his goal with a flourish. It was a severed hand.

Rose stared. Why was Jack carrying around a severed hand? How did Jack get a severed hand in the first place? Then she realized that something about it looked familiar. Moving quickly before her squeamishness could stop her, she reached out and held the hand.

It was deathly still and even colder than usual, but she’d know the feel of that hand anywhere. She let go.

“That’s the Doctor’s,” she said.

Jack nodded. “I don’t know why, but it’s one of the few objects I have in the real world that manifests here. Here it seems to do just fine on its own, but over there I have a fancy case to keep it healthy. I keep it on my desk as a paperweight.”

“I traveled with the Doctor and I work for Torchwood, so I’ve seen plenty of strange stuff, but that’s off the scale for weird and creepy.”

“I strive to always exceed expectations,” Jack quipped. When Rose continued to scowl at him, he put the hand back in the saddlebag.

“Back in the office, it’s wired to help me track the Doctor. I have questions for him. You two left me there, like a prince on the steps of the palace at midnight, except all the other guests at the ball were dead, and I never even got to dance before you ran away. Was the TARDIS going to change into a pumpkin if you waited five more minutes?” There was desolation in Jack’s expression and a coldness that made Rose shiver.

“I’m so sorry. I was unconscious when we took off, but I should have made him give me more information. He was about to regenerate from absorbing the time vortex. I don’t think he was thinking quite straight. Probably he just assumed you were dead.”

“And he didn’t even have enough respect for me to take care of my body?” Jack lashed out bitterly.

“Oh, Jack. I wish…” She trailed off, knowing no amount of wishing or apologizing could undo the wrong done to him. His expression softened.

“I know. It’s done now.”

“Take me with you on your horse! If you always make it back to our universe, then I can come too. I’ve got my supercharged mobile to call him with. He’ll come for me, and we’ll make him answer you,” Rose proposed.

“I wish it were that easy. From your story, I’m guessing that you’re here in your real physical body. My body stayed in Cardiff–no, I don’t know why I can still touch you. I don’t think you could come through my way. At best, you’d be left in the woods. At worst, it could kill you or leave you stuck in my body with me, and not in a good way.”

“When I get through, I’ll make him come to you,” she promised. (_Say when, not if, and pray that speaking makes it true. _)

“I’ll be waiting for you,” Jack said, and Rose’s heart ached with the trust he was giving her, so undeserved.

“Hey. You were complaining you never got to dance at the ball. I think being dead is messing with your memories, because I’m positive that you and I danced.”

“We did indeed, but not with the moves I wanted,” he said, gathering her in a dance hold.

“I take it you would have preferred the horizontal tango?” Rose smiled slyly as they began to sway, finding a rhythm without music.

“Up against a wall would be all right too.”

“In your dreams. You’re incorrigible! What was that Mickey called you? Captain of the Innuendo Squad, that’s it.” She teased him, but allowed him to pull her even closer.

“And proud of it! Come to think of it, with all of the sexual tension at my version of Torchwood, I really _am_ Captain of the Innuendo Squad.”

“Have I told you yet that I missed you?”

“Not enough,” replied Jack, and dipped her. Rose squealed in glee.

When they pulled out of the dip, Jack’s horse was facing them. It grabbed Jack’s collar in its teeth and tugged gently. Jack stopped dancing.

“I’ve got to go,” he said reluctantly. “I don’t want _this_ ride to leave without me.”

“I’ll see you on the other side,” Rose vowed.

“Maybe we can take the path of needles together there, if you know what I mean.” Jack winked.

Rose raised an eyebrow at him. “You know, the last thing you said to me on the Game Station was ‘see you in hell.’ I never guessed you meant it literally.”

“This isn’t hell,” Jack said, all seriousness. “It’s much better than that, and much more terrifying.”

“You won’t remember this, will you?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It gives me an excuse to do this,” Rose said, and kissed him. It was swift, barely longer than their kiss on the Game Station, but intense. It sent warmth spreading throughout Rose’s body, and when they split apart she was hardly surprised at all to find Jack literally glowing. Then she noticed that the horse was glowing too, suggesting that more than the kiss was at work.

“Time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” she murmured. Jack climbed smoothly onto the white horse, cloak swirling behind him.

“Stay on the path. Beware the trees. Don’t eat anything you’re offered here, especially if it’s offered by a sharp-toothed granny. Listen to your heart. Most of all, don’t forget to remind me of what just happened when we meet again out of the woods.” Jack spoke swiftly, trying to rein in his horse as it pawed restlessly at the ground. The glow around them increased by the moment.

“Aye aye, Captain.” Rose saluted.

“My lady.” Jack returned the salute. They held eye contact for a moment longer, and then Jack nudged his heels against the horse.

The horse sprang into motion. It galloped swiftly down the path, growing brighter step by step. Near the edge of Rose’s vision, the horse jumped. It didn’t come down, galloping several strides into the sky before vanishing in a flash of light.

Rose wrapped her arms around herself for a moment, trying to lock in the sensation of human warmth for the chilly journey ahead. Then she picked up her basket and walked on.

* * *


	3. Temptations, Rules, and Conversations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose receives an offer, notices a problem with her shoes, and talks on the phone. The Doctor watches clouds and eats soup.

_Sweet wild road ahead  
Sweet wild road ahead  
If I lied and said that all was well  
I might as well be dead_  
-The Wailin’ Jennys, “The Devil’s Paintbrush Road”

_Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?_  
-Kelly Link, “Travels with the Snow Queen”

* * *

They lay on their backs on the thick purple moss, shoulders a finger-width short of touching, watching the clouds.

“See over there? That one looks just like a castle. A castle in the clouds!” Martha pointed.

“On Tathshup Six they live in real castles in the clouds. Force fields give the water vapor shape and solidity enough to walk on them. The floors do squish a bit, like walking around on a giant waterbed. Then there’s the New Netherlands, where they have a city built on top of a literal giant waterbed. You want to go there?” The Doctor turned his head to look at Martha’s profile.

“Some day, I guess. Can’t we just enjoy where we are now? Tell me what you see in the clouds,” Martha requested plaintively.

“Clouds. Right. I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,” he said.

“Hey, you. Be serious.” Martha elbowed him.

“Joni Mitchell is serious!” the Doctor protested weakly. “From this side, that one over there looks like an Apatosaurus. Wait, no, neck’s a bit too long proportionally for that…it’s a Diplodocus. Definitely a Diplodocus.”

Martha chuckled. “I see it! Look off to the right. I see a giant spider.”

“Ooooh. That’s a bit unsettling. Speaking of unsettling, right next to the spider is a Xoxog battleship.”

“All I see is a lumpy blob.”

“Well, that’s what the Xoxog battleships look like. Lumpy blobs that can blow a moon out of the sky,” the Doctor said defensively.

“Ouch. Time to find some happier clouds. Just above the horizon I see one that looks like a Christmas tree.”

“That is _not_ happy. I’ve been attacked by Christmas trees! Twice, in fact. Luckily, that cloud you claim is a tree actually looks more like a girl. What you thought was the trunk is her legs, then she’s wearing a skirt. It bulges out a bit at the top where her head is, which a tree wouldn’t do.”

“If you say so. I’m trying to figure out that one a bit above the tree-girl-thingy. I think it might be a wolf. It’s got its head back to howl, and its tail is stretched out behind it,” Martha explained. The sudden knot in the Doctor’s guts contrasted horribly with the cheerful lightness in his companion’s voice.

The Doctor made a noncommittal “hmm” noise. It had been such a good day, just the thing the two of them needed to recover from the close call on the spaceship about to crash into the sun. He didn’t want to spoil it for her, no matter what he now felt.

They lay in silence for a little while, watching the sunset spread its fiery paint slowly across the sky.

“Strange winds up there,” remarked Martha. “They’re moving the wolf cloud closer to the girl cloud, like the bad wolf’s going to eat her or something. It should be a spectacular show when they collide. The sky even looks bloody.”

The Doctor stealthily reached into his pocket and turned off the ultrasonic signal his screwdriver had been putting out to keep away the moss meadow’s many biting insects. A few moments later Martha slapped her shoulder, then her leg, then the inch of exposed skin between her top and jeans.

“Argh! Bloody alien mosquitoes have to spoil sunset! There’s hundreds of them all of a sudden. Let’s go before they drain me dry.”

The Doctor paused for a moment at the TARDIS door. Just above the horizon, the wolf and the girl were colliding in crimson and gold splendor.

“It’s cloud illusions I recall,” he murmured, but Joni Mitchell couldn’t smooth the prickling of his manly hairy arms.

  
* * *  
Rose was pretty sure that as she walked farther the trees grew closer together and crowded nearer to the path. For the first time since she began walking, the forest grew dimmer, as if evening approached.

Another crossroads loomed. She approached cautiously, but there was no sign of anything waiting at the four-way crossing. She looked both ways and strode into the middle.

“Good evening,” said a man’s voice from directly behind her. She whirled, adrenaline surging.

The speaker appeared to be a human male. His thick black hair was so meticulously groomed he could have been on the TV news. His charcoal grey suit and sculpted features would also have fit in on the news, but his skin was far too pallid to work well on television.

“You look like you’ve traveled a long way. Care for a nice cold soda pop?” The man, who spoke with an American accent, held out a glass Coca-Cola bottle. It was moist with condensation. She watched the bubbles rising in it and suddenly felt very thirsty. He smiled at her and stretched the bottle out a little farther. Her hand rose to accept, but she thought of Jack’s warning.

“No, thank you,” she said.

The man shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He tilted his head back and drank deeply from the bottle himself. When he was finished he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his mouth. “So, what brings a lovely lady like yourself out here?”

“I’m looking for my friend,” Rose said, deliberately keeping it honest without revealing much.

“Lucky friend.”

“Perhaps. Hey, can you tell me where these roads lead?” Rose was wary of the man, but she figured she’d hear what he had to say.

“You bet your britches I can, but that’s not all. I can take you all the way to your destination,” he offered.

“I’m not sure about that. It’s a long way.”

“Straight through to the universe where you came from, right to the doors of the TARDIS, quick as that!” he said with a click of his fingers and a showman’s smile.

The first question in Rose’s mind was “how?,” followed very closely by “how do you know about me and the TARDIS?,” but another question struck her as even more important.

“Why? What’s in it for you?” she demanded.

“I try to help out a person in distress and she assumes I’m out to profit off her. So jaded so young! What a shame,” the stranger scolded with exaggerated offense. “I like to think of myself as a philanthropist. However, I admit that I’m also a businessman. I do charge a small fee. Don’t worry; it’s something I know you can afford. Most people never even notice that it’s gone.”

Rose didn’t like his generalities or his too-perfect teeth. His every little movement seemed planned and controlled in a way that wasn’t normal for humans (with the possible exception of ninjas).

“Thank you, but no. I’m doing fine on my own.” She tried to walk on, but the stranger stepped in front of her.

“I can spare you all the hardship and danger of the woods. You get exactly what you want, right now. No uncertainty, no risk. You could fail so easily on your road. What I want from you is such a very small thing, so easily given. You don’t often come across this sort of win-win bargain.” He spoke slowly, his voice low and seductive.

Rose thought of her weary feet and the long struggle ahead with no knowledge of whether success was even possible. She ached to get back to the Doctor; wasn’t any cost worth it?

Of course not.

“I’m nobody’s whore,” Rose snapped. Whether or not that was actually what he wanted, she believed that his price was something at least as terrible.

“Now that’s jumping to conclusions. It’s not your body I want,” the stranger insisted. “Nothing so vulgar. You receive your deepest desire, and all I ask in return is your soul.”

“What? No!” Rose said, taking an involuntary step back. She wasn’t sure what she believed about souls, but whatever this stranger wanted from her could not be something she wanted to give.

“Of course, if your desire has changed and you don’t want the Doctor any more, I could take you back to the universe where you started. You could be reunited with your parents,” the stranger said calmly, as if he hadn’t heard her tone.

“If I chose that, I would be giving up my soul even if you didn’t take it. I’m not selling.”

“I could sweeten the deal for you. What else do you want? You’re pretty enough, but I could make you more beautiful than Helen of Troy. You could have astounding power like a sorcerer or near-infinite knowledge. You’d be your precious Doctor’s equal and more. If you worry about withering and dying before him, you could have a Time Lord’s lifespan. Your pick. I’ll even throw in a bonus. You like music? With my help, your playing could bring grown men to tears or wake the dead.” He held out a guitar, which hadn’t been there a second ago.

“Get away from me,” said Rose with steel in her voice.

The stranger took a small step back and bowed mockingly. Although nothing obvious changed about his appearance, somehow he no longer seemed at all human.

“I can see when I’m not wanted. Some people don’t know a good deal when they see one. If you ever change your mind…”

“What part of ‘no’ are you too thick too understand? The n, the o, or the silent ‘you bastard’? I’m going back to the Doctor, soul intact and on my own two feet. Any other way wouldn’t count. Now get out of my way.”

“Go then, valiant child,” said the thing that was not a man, its ordinary baritone voice suddenly bone-shakingly deep and overlain with grating harmonics. “But remember this: you cannot escape your destiny by falsely listing your name among the dead. Battle and death await you still.”

Rose saw simultaneously the likeness of a man and something huge and horned, burning darkly. It looked at her, and its mere gaze bit like death and worse. She felt as if her innards had been ripped out and replaced with ice and acid, but she kept her head up and walked right past the dreadful thing.

She picked a direction on pure instinct and kept walking for a long way before daring to glance over her shoulder. At the edge of her vision, the crossroads was empty. Only then did she allow herself to double over with dry heaves and helpless shivers. When her body quieted at last, she walked on.

* * *

John Smith ran his hand through his hair. He’d been marking for hours, but the stack of essays scarcely seemed to grow any smaller. How did these boys manage to use so many words to say so little so poorly? Honestly, some of them exhibited all the intelligence of apes.

He could take a break to call on Nurse Redfern. She had mentioned a need to go shopping in town; surely an escort to carry her bags would be of great assistance. No, he really should finish these essays. He told the boys he’d hand them back tomorrow, and he could hardly expect them to be punctual in their work if he didn’t set a proper example.

The next essay was Timothy Latimer’s. Good. At least he would be spared from reading the worst abuses of history and grammar for a few moments. As he read he found little cause for complaint and indeed some surprisingly advanced analysis for one so young. He noted his comments (putting special emphasis on the few errors–it wouldn’t do to let the lad get too comfortable), flipped the essay over onto the finished stack, and froze.

On the back of Latimer’s last page was a drawing. It could have been a large dog, but something about its expression told its true identity even without the scrawled label: Bad Wolf. It stared out of the paper straight at him. Savagery flickered in its pencil eyes, but also intelligence and something more. Mystery. Magic. Invitation.

He stared at the drawing. It was just pencil on paper, but it seemed more alive than any of the flesh and blood people he knew. Abruptly he flipped the essay over, crossing out his mark and replacing it with a lower one. He ignored the voice whispering that he took off points not just because the drawing was there but because the intense gaze of the wolf disturbed him, nagging him with the sensation that he was forgetting something. That was nonsense. Doodling on an essay simply wouldn’t do.

The strangest part was that he’d been dreaming of a wolf just last night. The wolf had spoken to him, licked him clean, and raised him in her den like Mowgli the jungle child. It was a curious change from the dreams where he was the powerful Doctor, for there had been no doubt in this dream that it was the wolf in control, not him. In the dream he’d bathed in the warm glow of the wolf’s love, but here, in the gray light of day, he wanted only to banish the dream and find a bit of peace. The wolf had dissolved with the morning, leaving him feeling horribly empty. Better to forget it had ever been. Latimer’s drawing was chance, nothing more. It was the twentieth century, and he was too rational a man to see omens and portents.

* * *

Her feet hurt. They had hurt for some time, but eventually the pain grew sharp enough that she paused to make sure she hadn’t lodged a stone in her shoe.

The soles of her trainers were nearly worn through. They had been nearly new when she stepped through the portal. Even with constant walking, it should have taken weeks to batter the soles down to such a fabric-thin state. Weeks of walking, but she had not eaten, drunk, slept, or stopped to relieve herself. For the space of a breath, her gut clenched in panic at the illogic of it. With the next exhalation she let the panic go.

She felt a strange lightness, as if a bundle of balloons had been attached to her belt, lifting her half off the ground. The woods operated by their own rules, and she gave herself over to them completely. Really, she had made her choice long ago.

Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ Lives were not like stories: they were lusher, more complex, less coherent. Characters came and went without much explanation. Events happened without any clear connection to each other or the overarching arc of a person’s life. This life was not without its glories _(meeting on the street corner, two a.m., trying to catch a cab)_, but narratively it was something of a mess.

Then a hand reached out in a basement and pulled Rose into a different world, a world of heroes, monsters, and damsels who cause the monsters a lot of distress. She felt herself becoming part of something larger. One day she saved the world from the metal-armored demon she accidentally awoke. It died because it could not cope with her purity of heart intruding upon its monstrous self. Afterwards she stared at her hands in astonishment, wondering what she was becoming. _(Adventurer, daredevil, madwoman?) _

Nevertheless, she remained tied to the world of daily bustle. Was it out of habit, good sense, or fear? She strung out her boyfriend with uncertainty about what still lay between them. She invited a pretty boy along on her magic journey because, however much he claimed to dream of stars, he was entirely of the Earth. She bought celebrity gossip magazines from a dozen worlds. She skirted the edges of the wood, the reaching fingers of the trees’ shade barely dappling her skin.

Then the universe presented her with a stark either/or choice. Down the easy way, the path others tried to point her down, lay home and comfort and the beautiful, sloppy confusion of reality. Down the other way lay suffering and sacrifice, but also grandeur and heroism and a wild grace. It was the way of the Quest, the path through the wolf’s woods. She did not even hesitate in her choice.

Logic in stories is not like logic of the rest of the world. In ordinary logic, a human shopgirl should not have been able to pilot a TARDIS that a Time Lord had specifically instructed to stay put. Impossible! But Rose entered the realm of story, where events happen because they _must_, irrespective of whether they _can_ happen. Her indomitable will _had_ to be enough to open a way to the Doctor where no way should have existed, so the way opened. Her love was fiercer and purer than the Daleks’ hate, so her words must obliterate all their weapons. She was the Bad Wolf, and her howl summoned her packmate from beyond the gates of death itself.

She was the floodwater and the springtime and the love. Above all else, love. The center of time burned within her, and she danced with the turn of the universe.

Such power cost, of course. It should have taken her life, a sacrifice gladly made. Then the Doctor followed her into the heart of the woods. He saved her with a kiss, as he must. He transformed the beast within her back into a girl. Off came his skin, shed like ill-fitting clothes, and he was reborn. The fire in both of their eyes faded to faint coals covered over with ash.

Afterwards, she still ate chips and laughed at cheesy jokes and applied her mascara too thickly and got PMS and all the trappings of normal life, but things had changed. Even though she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened when she was the Bad Wolf, she knew that she walked a new path. She was the stuff of legend. And when the old enemies were reborn (for evil is very nearly as persistent as good) and the walls of the universe closed, she was not beaten. The wolf uncurled itself and lapped the tears from her face, drinking deep of her grief and determination, growing strong. _(Remember, human child: not what can be but what must be.)_

She said she would stay with the Doctor forever. Now, she knew she would search for him forever if need be. Forever and a day.

Later, when the soles of her shoes started to detach and flap up and down like wagging tongues, she took them off and carried on barefoot.

* * *

He tried to work, but he wasn’t making much progress. The flat was too cold and too loud. There wasn’t much to be done about the cold, not on their budget, and gloves would take away the dexterity he needed to make the fine inner workings of his timey-wimey detector. There wasn’t much to be done about the loud either, not with gauze-thin walls, the Barretts upstairs having a baby and the O’Connors next door being newlyweds (and wasn’t _that_ awkward when he and Martha were jammed in cheek to jowl in this flat). Right now, though, the flat seemed louder than usual and unusually strident…the phone! He shot up to grab the receiver.

“Hello? Martha! …Oh, I’m fine. Brilliant, in fact.” That was a lie, but Martha would tell her version of the same lie when he asked her about her day at work.

“Could you do me a favor and pick up some extra garlic on your way home? I’m going to cook stuffed aubergines, and I want the flavor to be strong enough to clear vampires from the whole neighborhood, not that we have vampires, I hope….Working late _again_?...Yes, I know we need the money. Of course. I’ll save the aubergines for another night… See you when you get here, then. Oh, and Martha? You win bread with the best of the breadwinners.” That last bit got a tiny laugh. Good. She didn’t laugh much lately. Neither of them did.

He hung up the receiver and glared around the room as if somehow the threadbare carpet and peeling paint were causes rather than symptoms of his problems. He usually loved 1969 (Moon landing! Woodstock! _Abbey Road_ album! Protests galore!), but that was when he had the ability to leave any time. Without the TARDIS, it was just endless images of war on the telly, the humdrum rhythms of daily existence, and always the unfamiliar worry about money. His psychic paper and sonic screwdriver would be enough to pull off any number of heists that would enable them to wait this out in style, but they’d decided to live honestly unless an emergency came up. Horrible as the thought was, sometimes he wished they had enough money to get a house with a mortgage–anything was better than the dingy flat.

Then there was Martha, brilliant Martha, once again forced into dreary, demeaning tasks for his sake. Astoundingly, she still believed in him. Nevertheless, he could see the leaving in the back of her eyes. He’d seen that look before. Not right away, but soon. She probably didn’t know it yet, but staying was the only thing she wouldn’t do for him. The Doctor wasn’t sure whether he was more disturbed by that undeserved belief or the approaching departure.

What he needed was something simple, quick, and warm in his belly. Luckily, they had just the thing to cheer him up: alphabet soup. How could anyone be unhappy while consuming soup that spelled?

He heated up the soup, savoring the hearty odors. His stomach made a loud noise, alerting him that he’d been too distracted to eat lunch. When the soup was hot he ladled it out and sat at the table. Though hungry, he delayed eating for a moment to wrap his hands around the bowl, letting warmth permeate his stiff fingers while his eyes ran over the letters on the surface, finding dozens of words.

The very first spoonful of glorious soup stopped halfway to his mouth. There were only three letters floating in the spoonful of broth: B, A, and, of course D. He almost got up and dumped the entire bowl of soup down the sink, but Martha had talked with him just last Tuesday about not being wasteful. Besides, it could be simple chance. He was careful to keep his next spoonful so full of letters that no words could be seen, and so with all subsequent spoonfuls. Eventually the soup was almost gone, but four letters remained stuck to the side of the bowl: WOLF. He exploded.

“Oh, come _on!_ My soup? This is getting ridiculous! What next? New freckles spelling it on my face? The neighbors’ noisy bedsprings beating it out in Morse code?” The Doctor glared at the soup bowl with a force that very nearly made the poor dish grow legs and run away.

“What are you trying to accomplish? Why put these words here, where they can do nothing to lead you back to the Game Station? Are you paying any attention to where you scatter your message? Or do you see that I’m reading them alone? Are you trying to make sure I remember you? Is that it? I don’t need the reminder! I couldn’t forget you if I wanted to. Every hour of every day, waking or sleeping, I think about you. I remember that I lost you. So unless you’re going to communicate something _real_, unless you’re going to wave your glowing hand and open up a door to that other universe to bring back your future self, you can bloody well stop this! Do you hear me, Rose?!” he shouted wildly at an audience two hundred thousand years away.

Upstairs, the baby started crying. The Doctor deflated, burying his face in his hands. “Oh, _Rose_,” he whispered.

  
* * *

Between the worlds there stood a forest. In the heart of the forest there stood the TARDIS. In front of the TARDIS stood, at last, Rose Tyler.

The TARDIS waited for her in a small clearing. Its blue was shockingly bright against the grayscale forest, its straight lines making it seem almost frighteningly solid. Rose remained frozen at the edge of the clearing, unable to comprehend its presence or its promise. A trail of bloody footprints measured the road behind her. She’d never lost focus on the object of her quest, but she could no longer quite recall what it was like not to be walking, not to be in pain, not to be in the woods. Her heart tried to batter its way through her ribs at the marvelous, terrifying concept of an ending for the quest.

If this was the ending, it came at the right time. The diffuse white light that had shone constantly for so long when she first entered the woods had slowly faded over many miles. Here, the forest seemed to be shrouded in twilight. The path had grown narrower too until it barely kept her out of reach of the trees. Under the eaves of the forest, the unintelligible whispers grew closer. Closer and, perhaps, angrier.

Rose inspected the TARDIS from a distance, wary of the intensity of the unseen voices around the clearing. She didn’t know of a reason for the TARDIS to be in the Void, so she had to look out for the chance that it was a mirage or bait. If a trap waited, it was too subtle for her to see. She rested for a moment on the breathless edge of triumph. Then she dashed forward, fumbling in her pockets for the key as she ran.

An instant before her key could slip into the lock, the ornamental police phone rang. She froze. The TARDIS phone wasn’t real. If it rang, that meant that either this wasn’t her Doctor’s TARDIS or something was very wrong indeed.

The phone kept ringing, so, giving in to the sense of inevitability, Rose answered it.

“Hello? Who is this?” Rose asked in a polite tone.

_“I am the Bad Wolf,”_ the phone informed her, sounding as if it came from a great distance. A stir swept through the whispering forest. She knew that voice. From where?

“Why does everybody think they’re the Bad Wolf lately? That’s my title. Does this have something to do with the Little Red Riding Hood thing Jack was going on about?” Rose pressed her back against the TARDIS so she could keep an eye on the trees. There was something she was missing here, something she should remember.

_ “I create myself.” _ With those words, Rose understood where she knew the voice. Strangely distorted and layered, it was nevertheless her own voice, together with something vast and mighty born of the Vortex. _ (Yet how powerful had she become on her own, the girl who had left bloody footprints across numberless leagues?) _

_ “I take the words,” _ continued the phone. _ “I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.” _

Here: the heart of the forest. The wolf’s den, the dragon’s lair, the witch’s house, the belly of the beast, the Dalek-infested Game Station. The place of trial. It was her immutable destiny and her conscious choice. It was not her final goal.

“I’m trying to get back to the Doctor again. Do you know how to reach my home universe?” she asked, hoping that the echo of her past could offer advice.

_ “I can see everything,” _ the phone replied unhelpfully.

“Yeah, that’s great,” said Rose, running a hand through her hair in frustration. She’d asked if it knew the way back, not what that way was. She hoped there wasn’t some limit in number of questions. She hoped she could get away from the whispers before it got any darker. “Please tell me how to get out of the woods and back to the Doctor.”

_ “I can see the whole of time and space–every single atom of your existence, and I divide them.” _The voice on the phone–her wolf voice–was still distant, but it had gained an edge like a razor.

Rose straightened in shock. “No! I’m you, or a part of you anyway. Why kill me?”

_ “I bring life.” _

She thought of Jack, unable to die since the Game Station. She closed her eyes. When she heard the story from him, she’d suspected, but the wonder and careless power of her wolf self’s words made her sure. Well, nothing to be done about it except confess when (if) she next saw him. But what did it mean now?

She reopened her eyes. The trees were closer. They looked less and less like real trees.

“I don’t want to be immortal. I don’t want anybody’s atoms divided. I just need to get back to my universe.” Rose forced herself to speak slowly and calmly despite the menacing woods.

_ “The sun and the moon... the day and night.” _

“Yeah. That universe. Sun, moon, Earth, Raxacoricofallapatorious, chips, kittens, a distinct shortage of zeppelins, and most of all the Doctor. Can I get there from here? Soon, please.” Rose snapped a bit. There was a pattern in the trees’ whispers, perhaps a word still not quite intelligible to her conscious mind, but something in the back of her skull recognized it and trembled. Was she going to meet her end in these woods after coming so far?

_ “Everything must come to dust... all things. Everything dies.” _

Rose knew the truth of those words deep in the marrow that had once held the time vortex, but that didn’t mean she had to accept them peacefully.

“Not before I get back to the Doctor. He needs a hand to hold.” _ (Believe: not what can be but what must be.) _

_ “My Doctor.” _ Such love in that voice!

“For his sake, show me what to do next,” Rose commanded.

_ “The Time War ends.” _

Before Rose could voice objection to the cryptic nature of the advice, the door of the TARDIS opened. She stepped inside.

* * *


	4. The Beginning and the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To every thing there is a season: a time for a girl, and a time for the Bad Wolf; a time of war, and a time of peace; a time to be born, and a time to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some slightly shaky canon and some fairly hand-wavey science in this chapter. However, at the end of the chapter I've included supporting evidence for one of the stranger ideas.

_“Folk seem to have been just landed in [the tales that really mattered], usually–their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, for turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on–and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.”_  
-Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

  
* * *

“Oh. You’ve come,” said the Doctor. It was not a joyful cry of welcome. His voice was flat and dead as a salt pan. Even the Northern accent could not enliven it.

The Doctor was as she had first met him, only more so. His hair was cropped closer than she’d ever seen it, Auschwitz-short. It emphasized his ears and the immense dark circles under his eyes. He leaned over the console as if his legs alone could not support his weight. Instead of his trademark leather jacket, he wore a green velvet frock coat so poorly fitted that inches of forearm stuck out of the cuffs. A large dark stain marred the fabric over his chest. His trousers did not reach his ankles, and his feet were bare. A pair of shoes lay carelessly on the floor. It didn’t take her long to realize that the metallic smell inside the TARDIS must be dried blood, visible on the Doctor’s clothing and the spatters on the TARDIS’s wooden floor.

Wooden floor? The interior of the TARDIS was nothing like what she knew, full of wood and analog-seeming instruments. Still, the TARDIS-feeling, the sensation of simultaneously setting off and coming home, was the same. The TARDIS’s welcome song trilled through her mind, opening up passages long closed. It was the same TARDIS all right, and she was damaged. There were gaping cracks in the floor, a worrisome wheeze in the engines’ hum, and sparking wires hanging from the ceiling. The TARDIS’s presence in her mind was a little too bright, making Rose wonder if the ship was somehow leaking telepathically.

Rose guessed that this Doctor must come from before he met her, apparently just after regenerating. He’d mentioned once that he’d regenerated during the War, and she saw that war written over every inch of his body and his TARDIS. She ached to go to him, to comfort him and confirm his reality though touch, but if he hadn’t met her then she dared not. Rose wished she were a Time Lord; one heart couldn’t break enough to contain what she felt when she saw her Doctor like that and couldn’t properly ease his pain, not to mention her own long loneliness.

But why did he sound like he was expecting her if they hadn’t met yet? So many things she wanted, _needed_, to say, but they all withered on the way to her mouth.

“You’ve got big ears,” she accidentally said instead, setting her basket on the floor.

“The better to hear you with, but isn’t that supposed to be your line?” He glanced at her for just an instant, and his eyes burned her like liquid nitrogen.

“What?” Rose asked, confused.

“You’re the Bad Wolf. I don’t know what that means, but the Oracle predicted you back on Delphi–the planet, not the city. She gave us the prophecy to end the war: ‘To kill the weed you must yank out its roots, and if they tangle with the roots of your orchard then you must uproot all. Go to the Howling, and the Bad Wolf will find you.’ Never understood the Wolf part, but that seemed tangential. We traced the timelines back to find the point where we could eliminate the Daleks utterly. The only sure way is to go all the way back to the very beginning of the universe, seed their destruction in the path of the Big Bang itself. The changes abolish Gallifrey just as completely. Couldn’t have that, so the Council waited.

“We waited as planet after planet fell. Only when the first Dalek touched Gallifrey’s own soil did we admit that there was no choice. Sodding Council probably thought they were doing me a favor, letting the rebel child be the one to destroy it all. They’d have picked the Master if he hadn’t already run off. They never understood…but that’s not the point. The point is that I got here–got killed on the way, for what it’s worth–and now I can’t do it. Not can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t physically make it happen.” The Doctor gave his explanation as if talking to himself, looking at the console and not Rose. His voice sagged with weariness, so exhausted he sounded almost unconcerned with the events he related.

“We’re at the beginning of the universe? I thought I was in the Void between parallel universes,” Rose asked, hoping that if she kept him talking she could keep him from shattering any further.

“Same thing. It’s the realm of pure possibility, the birthplace of all universes. In relation to any universe, it’s simultaneously before and between that universe and all others. A bit like how light’s a particle and a wave, only the duality here is in temporal-dimensional location. The Void’s all the matter in the universe packed tight, so indistinguishable that nothing can be said to exist. No time, no space. It’s everything and nothing.” He seemed slightly steadier on his feet when talking technical, but Rose knew that was always true.

“There’s woods out there,” she pointed out. “Miles of paths too. That’s not nothing.”

“Out there, you see whatever your mind makes to try to comprehend. You’re the Bad Wolf, so I suppose woods make sense.” The Doctor frowned, seeming to see her for the first time. The force of his gaze ripped into her, stripped away the eggshell and set the hatchling free. “You don’t look much like any wolf I’ve ever seen.”

_The better to love you with, my dear,_ Rose thought. What she said was, “I haven’t always been a wolf.”

“Oh no,” the Doctor said. “A wolf is a wolf, even when it’s in Red Riding Hood’s clothing.” Before she could really register his approach he was standing beside her, fingering the collar of her red hoodie. The back of his hand brushed against her neck, and it was colder than she’d ever felt it. It was not a companionable gesture. When he approached her, he seemed to seek the Bad Wolf, laying himself bare to the danger. _(It’s not the urge to fall but the urge to jump, not the impulse to brave the woods but the yearning to embrace the hunter.)_

Rose shivered. He was right. She had always been the Wolf, would always be the Wolf, but that wasn’t the whole story.

“We make our own fairy tales,” she told him.

The mangled sound in the TARDIS’s engines might almost have been a howl. Something within Rose answered, stirring from its den in the deep recesses of her mind. She reached up a small hand and laid it against the Doctor’s face. Somehow, the light welling up from her skin seemed perfectly natural to her.

“You’re glowing,” the Doctor said, awe somehow penetrating his grief.

“I will help you end the War, Doctor. What do we do?” _(I am the Bad Wolf.)_

Rose was more conscious of herself than she’d been when she opened the heart of the TARDIS on the Game Station. She did not see all of time and space, but the power of the Time Vortex that had never been fully expunged surged within her, enhanced by the leaking energies of the damaged TARDIS.

“I’ve created a program on the TARDIS computer to manipulate energy and time streams to set the universe I come from on a collision course with the possible universe where Daleks could not have come into existence. Daleks and Gallifrey. After the moment that I left the universe to come here, the universes will collide, mix a bit, and bounce apart, leaving the Daleks gone throughout time. Their memory stays, because otherwise it would just be eliminating this universe in favor of the other. I didn’t realize until I got here that the change needs to be triggered with immense amounts of vortex energy channeled outside the TARDIS as well as inside simultaneously. It can’t be done.” He raised up a hand to hold hers against his face.

_(Not what can be, but what must.)_

“I’ll take the outside. You take the inside. Together, we’ll do what must be done.” She spoke softly, gently, and with absolute certainty. She understood now that the end of one Quest is the beginning of another, or sometimes the beginning of the very same Quest. She had found the Doctor. Although she wished she could let the pinstriped Doctor she had left behind see her again, she accepted that this seemed to be the last step in her journey. Once she might have been afraid, but she’d kicked off that fear like worn out shoes somewhere in the woods.

_(The Time War ends.)_

“You’ll die. The English name Big Bang is inelegant, but very accurate.” The Doctor had piloted his TARDIS to the beginning of the universe, the genesis of all possibilities, but there was no hope within him.

“Everything dies,” she told him with a smile. “Might as well die giving birth to a universe without Daleks.” So the Beast’s prophecy was true after all. Never mind that she knew that the solution would be incomplete, buying time instead of fixing the problem. Some Daleks would survive, but she still had to do this. Happily ever after is a false promise, but that doesn’t make the story meaningless.

His cheek was less bitterly cold where her hand rested against it. “Yes,” the Doctor said. Then he pulled away from her and began dashing around the room, gathering parts from storage bins. He tackled the assemblage with the sonic screwdriver, then plugged it into the TARDIS console and hammered at the keyboard for a few minutes.

He held up the finished result. It was a circle of twisted wire bedecked with microchips and crystals. He walked over to Rose and ever so gently set it on her head like a crown. The crystals scattered the light that still shone faintly from her, making her feel like a human (lupine?) disco ball.

“When you’re outside, you trigger your part by speaking the words,” the Doctor explained.

“Words?”

“Your name,” said the Doctor, taking her hand and tracing letters on the back of it. BAD WOLF. Of course. She nodded.

“I’ll turn on the outside mike so I’ll hear you and know when to flip the switch in here. Then everything explodes, and _bang! _ No Daleks.” The lack of Time Lords went unspoken.

“Wait…we’re triggering the Big Bang? Does that make you…”

“I’m not God!” he insisted, far too loudly for the room. More calmly, he continued, “We’re not triggering the Big Bang, just moving ourselves from the point before to the point where it’s already happening and altering the paths of two of the emergent universes. It would make more sense if you could understand the explanation in Gallifreyan. It’s still more power than mortals ought to wield, but it’s the only way.”

“Gotcha.” Rose smiled at him as if she weren’t about to throw herself into the most massive explosion ever. He stared back at her in wonder and confusion that couldn’t have been greater if a Cyberman baked him a chocolate birthday cake. Moments passed (or seemed to pass, since they were in the nonspace before the universe where Time was even more illusory than it was elsewhere). A touch of sadness crept into the corners of Rose’s eyes.

“You’ll have to forget me. We don’t want to cause a paradox when you meet me again after this.”

“There is no after this. The TARDIS and I won’t survive any more than you will,” he said, as if to a young child.

“On our first date, you took me to the end of the world, the day Earth’s sun expands. Now it’s our last date from my perspective, and we’re at the beginning of the world. Makes a nice symmetry, don’t you think? You’ll survive.” She leaned closer to him, trying to will some of her certainty into him.

“What if I don’t want to?” he asked, voice sharp as broken ice.

“The universe needs you. Besides, I want you safe, my Doctor.”

Rose slowly put a hand behind his head and slowly drew him down to her. She kissed him with infinite tenderness. He responded as if drawn instinctively to her warmth and vitality and or perhaps drawn consciously to her enigma and danger. His tongue slipped between her lips like a needle into fabric. Rose’s other hand made small circles against the velvet on his back. Their bare toes touched. The warm glow emanating from her skin reached out to embrace the Doctor, but when Rose pulled away it stayed with her.

“You shouldn’t remake the universe wearing clothes from your old life. They don’t fit. Take this coat off. Throw it into the fire of the new universe.” It seemed the right thing to say.

Just then Rose could have ordered the Doctor to walk on water and he would have obeyed (a situation not too different from the normal state of their relationship). She helped him out of his jacket. Then she let him strip off her scarlet hoodie. The Bad Wolf and lost girl were both part of her, but it was the Wolf’s hunting hour; no more Little Red right now.

He stood in his battered, bloody white poet’s shirt and she in her white t-shirt. Without the outer layers that once defined them, the broken soldier and the bloody-footed journeyer looked as naked as Adam and Eve. Naked, but a long way from vulnerable.

“Who _are_ you? Bad Wolf can’t be your only name.” He cupped her chin in his hand.

“Why not? You refuse to be called anything but the Doctor!” she teased. When he looked like he might believe her, she told him, “Find out when you meet me again for the first time.”

She saw a multitude of questions written across his face. However, he asked no more, understanding that knowing more made forgetting harder.

“Well, nameless wolf-woman, are you ready for this?”

Of course she wasn’t. She crossed the woods to find him, and now she was going to lose him, not to mention her life, after a single kiss. Nevertheless, she nodded.

“First we should both eat a biscuit. Then we go kick some plunger,” she said. She picked up the basket from the floor behind her, and they ate. As Rose touched a biscuit to her lips, a shower of sparks from the console startled her into dropping the biscuit. It disappeared into a crack in the wooden floor, forcing her to take another from the basket. The biscuits were chewy and sweet. They tasted of motherly love.

The Doctor kissed Rose’s forehead just beneath the crown device. Rose squeezed his hand briefly, touched the console and felt the heart of the TARDIS beating around her and within her, and went to the door.

“Live,” she reminded him. The door swung and she was gone.

* * *

Lucy Saxon twirled, showing off the elegant new red dress. Whenever her spin allowed, she kept her eyes fixed on the Master. He glanced at her dispassionately over the rim of a tea cup, then looked back down at the reports describing the progress of his rocket fleet. Lucy pouted. The Doctor, his wheelchair parked facing the scene, watched with no change in his wrinkled face. His eyes were so blank lately that the Master had been musing to Lucy about giving him a bit of false hope for the Earth just so he would perk up. This impassive despair made him no fun to torment.

“Well, Harry? What do you think?” Lucy prompted, running her hands up and down her body to emphasize how the dress flattered her curves.

“I think it makes you look like a little girl,” the Master said curtly. Lucy felt crestfallen. Then the Master rose from his chair and stalked towards her, his voice gone low and seductive. “A very pretty little girl lost in the woods and all alone. She is far, far from home, and so very frightened, poor thing. There are goose bumps rising all over her skin. She _should_ be frightened, oh yes, because I’m in the woods too.”

The Master stopped behind Lucy, so close she could feel his breath puffing against her neck as he spoke. She closed her eyes and shivered.

“Little Red Dress, prepare to be devoured. I am the big bad wolf, and I’m going to eat you up.” The Master whirled Lucy around in his arms and kissed her roughly, all nipping teeth and plundering tongue.

They were interrupted by the clatter of the Master’s tea tray hitting the ground and a shout.

“No!” shouted the Doctor, breathing hard from the effort of rising from the wheelchair and knocking the tray down. “No. You are not the Bad Wolf. You are nothing like that. You’re a jackal dressed in wolfskin. You’re a monster. The wolf kills, yes, but only to survive and protect its pack. It keeps the balance. You ravage the world for no reason except that you lack the imagination to do anything but destroy. If the real Bad Wolf ever gets her teeth on you, you will see yourself for what you are, and it will break you.”

It was far and away the most words the Doctor had strung together in weeks and more emotion than he’d shown since the Toclafane first devastated the earth. The Master and Lucy just stared at him.

“Lack imagination, do I?” said the Master eventually with deadly calm. “Francine, tell the guards to bring me Harkness. Tish, go to the kitchen and make an alphabetical list of every piece of equipment in there. I’m going to express my creativity on the Captain, starting with apple corer and working my way down to zester. The Doctor will watch.” The Master brushed past the Doctor, knocking into him with his shoulder hard enough to send the wizened Time Lord to the floor.

The Doctor lay where he landed. He was silent once more, but his eyes were no longer blank. The fiery rage of his outburst appeared to harden into determination, cold and inexorable as a glacier. The two Time Lords glared daggers at each other. The Master looked away first.

Lucy left the room unnoticed. She pulled a book out of the library at random to pass the hours until the Master remembered about her, but it was a book of fairy tales. They left her shaken and sick to her stomach. The Master’s eventual arrival brought no comfort.

Just before dawn, Lucy left the Master snoring and returned to the command room. Jack, eyes closed and unmoving, was still tied spread-eagled to the table, naked except for quite a lot of dried blood. The Doctor sat beside the table and held Jack’s bound hand.

Lucy approached the Doctor with a wince in her walk and a rapidly darkening bruise around her wrist the size of the Master’s grip.

“Who is the Bad Wolf?” she demanded.

The Doctor met her gaze, and Lucy fought the urge to back away.

“The name that keeps me fighting. A friend of mine,” he said.

“Is it powerful?” Lucy asked hungrily.

“_She_ is more than you can possibly imagine,” the Doctor told her. They both knew that Lucy knew quite a lot about power.

“If I help you summon her, will she kill Harry?” Lucy whispered.

“No,” said Jack. Lucy looked at him, startled. She hadn’t realized he was alive at the moment. The Doctor also looked at Jack. The two men locked eyes for a long moment.

“No,” agreed the Doctor at last. “She’s far beyond summoning. But if we could, she wouldn’t kill him.”

“Why can’t she kill him, if she’s so powerful?”

“Oh, it’s not a matter of what she _could_ do. I just think she’d do something far more devastating,” the Doctor said, surprise in his voice as if he had only just understood a great truth. “After she broke his power, she would forgive him.”

The next day, the Master apologized and filled her room with flowers, and Lucy forgot her anger. She decided that the Doctor had gone completely insane. Insanity seemed to suit him, though. His silence seemed more purposeful after that day, and the Master seemed almost afraid of his speech.

Later, everything fell apart and then fell together again. A moment filled with light withered Lucy like a cut flower in the desert. Afterwards, Lucy remembered the thought that pierced her skull and dragged her will into line with the remaining couple billion people on earth, and she remembered being glad of it.

Lucy remembered another voice in her mind for that agonizing shining moment, almost utterly unlike the human chorus but strengthening the Doctor in harmony with them. They would not have succeeded without that terrible voice. It echoed from the burning woods below to the frozen stars, howling.

* * *

When Rose left the TARDIS, the trees were much closer. They looked less like trees than ever. She felt certain that they were watching her.

“This has gone on long enough,” she addressed the forest, voice steady. “Who are you? Show yourselves!”

As if a fog rolled back, the trees’ forms grew clearer. The taller trees had two armlike branches and a narrow top, making them look much like men, though a bit too large and boxy. Their bark shone like metal. The shorter sort were rounded on top with bumpy bark and three branches, one of which ended in a large circular leaf, except it wasn’t a leaf. It was a plunger, and the other two branches were an eyestalk and a blaster.

Daleks. The short trees were Daleks, and the taller ones were Cybermen. The Doctor’s plan at Canary Wharf had sucked them into the Void, and here they were, with her in the no-place between and before the worlds. Millions of them. She’d been walking among them for her whole journey.

As they came towards her, the whiteness of the ground off the path that she’d assumed was snow rose up in clouds like dust. When some got into Rose’s nose, she realized it was neither snow nor dust but ashes.

Underneath, she could now make out traces of stumps, the remains of the true forest that the Daleks and Cybermen must have destroyed. So these were the woodcutters the werewolf warned her about.

The imposter trees weren’t whispering any longer.

“Exterminate!” blared the Daleks.

“Delete!” boomed the Cybermen. Rose thought her ears would burst with the clamor, but she did not retreat. Instead, she shouted.

“Stop!” Amazingly enough, they did.

“By whose authority?” A single Dalek rolled forward and questioned her.

“Mine,” she said, flipping her hair back. “Well, the Doctor’s too.”

The assembled Daleks and Cybermen broke into worried muttering.

“The Doctor we know,” said the spokes-Dalek. “We will exterminate him! But who are you to stand beside him? You are human. You have no weapons. You are defenseless.”

“Me? I’m a Torchwood agent and a former shopgirl. I am Jackie Tyler’s daughter, and I am the heart of the TARDIS incarnate.” The radiance from her skin flared and scattered off the crystals on her crown. The Daleks turned their eyestalks away, dazzled. “I’m in love, and that makes me more dangerous than a cyanide sandwich. I’m the heroine of this story. I am the Bad Wolf.”

There was a sound like a distant bell. They Daleks and Cybermen backpedaled as fast as they could.

“Exterminate!” they shouted, sounding more panicked than menacing.

“No,” said Rose, almost gently. “Germinate.”

Then she smiled at them and exploded.

  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _  
> * * *  
> The big bang theory tells us that the known universe once had no dimensions at all–no up or down, no left or right, no passage of time, and laws of physics beyond our vision.  
> -Joel Achenbach, "The God Particle," National Geographic Magazine, March 2008_
> 
> _Imagine that - nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down. No life. No time. Without end. My people called it the Void, the Eternals call it the Howling.  
> -The Doctor, "Army of Ghosts"_


	5. Presences and Voices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Living and dead, present and absent, possible and impossible...sometimes the categories blur. The Doctor receives cryptic advice.

_“You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”_  
-Neil Gaiman, _American Gods_

* * *

These are the things she thought about as she exploded:

She wondered if she had left the oven on when she left her flat in the other universe for the last time. She wondered if Jack ever found (would find? is finding? bloody time travel complicating language) the Doctor. She wondered if the Doctor would ever remember their meeting. She wished them both hands to hold, and not in a creepy severed hand sort of way. She wished the hands were hers.

She hadn’t realized it would be this beautiful, exploding. Her feet didn’t hurt anymore.

Rose Tyler thought quite a few more-or-less human things in a very short time. Then she stopped thinking quite like that, but she did not cease to be.

She did not cease.

* * *

The Doctor cautiously came down from the tree. His pursuers seemed to have lost the trail, but it was best never to trust such luck. A few moments looking, listening, and scanning with the sonic screwdriver made him confident enough to abandon his hiding place and go searching for the TARDIS.

Where _was_ the TARDIS? He knew the general direction, but with the many ravines and steep hills in this forest knowing the direction and the way were not synonymous. The Doctor struck off boldly, but two hours later all he had to show for his efforts were mud stains up to his knees and a truly impressive collection of twigs in his hair. He sat down on a log to remove some pebbles that had worked their way into his shoe.

“Lost your way?” said a voice from a thicket.

The Doctor could smell a distinctly animal musk, and the voice was notably deeper than the voices of any of this planet’s humanoids, though it spoke their language. In context, none of that was especially surprising. This planet was going through a stage where numerous species converged on sentience at once. It was a phenomenon that happened surprisingly often on young worlds, giving rise to folk tales of talking animals among many of the galaxy’s sentient species. Usually only one species retained speech over the long term (or, perhaps, usually only one species continued speaking in public).

The humanoids who were chasing him did not appear to be in alliance with any other species, so the Doctor decided to take a chance and tell the truth to this other being.

“Errr, yes. Have you seen a blue box? A bit taller than me, about so wide, sitting beside a stream?” He gestured to show the TARDIS’s dimensions.

“You are more lost than you realize,” rumbled the voice. The speaker stepped into view. It was an enormous wolf, tall enough to look the Doctor in the eye. (Of course, any xenobiologist would tell you that it was not a wolf. Wolves were from Earth and never grew anywhere near this large anyway. This was an alien creature brought to a superficial resemblance to Earth’s wolves through the marvels of convergent evolution. Any human who was _not_ a xenobiologist would tell you instantly that it was a gigantic wolf, never mind the fact that it bled blue-green blood.)

“Hello there,” said the Doctor, giving no visible sign of the fight or flight instincts that even advanced Time Lord evolution could not completely eliminate in the face of something so clearly predatory. His hearts sped up, but he smiled at the wolf, lips closed in case it took teeth as a sign of aggression.

“You run from what you should be seeking,” the wolf intoned. Its fur was deep-space black, and its eyes were yellow.

“I take it you don’t mean the fellows with the spears and the torches?” asked the Doctor, hoping this conversation wasn’t going where he thought it was going.

“I mean the Bad Wolf!” insisted the wolf.

The Doctor sighed. There went his hopes. “The Bad Wolf has come and gone for me. This message is just an echo.”

“She is no echo,” said the wolf, its tone so deep the Doctor felt it through the soles of his shoes in addition to his ears. “She is in the air that carries the sound. You cannot see her, Doctor, but she is still here.”

“How do you know my name?”

“My planet is young. We have not learned to make stories false. I know many things that you have forgotten. I know that wolves chase both the moon and the sun across the sky. I know the loveliest flowers grow farthest from the path. I know that the Wolf has ended the Time War not once, as you believe, but twice.”

“What are you talking about?” the Doctor interrupted as a tiny nagging voice reminded him how many of his memories of the destruction of Gallifrey and the Daleks rang false, as if he had created them to cover up the real events. He had never wanted or dared to dig for the truth. If the false memories were so terrible, how dreadful must the truth be? But how could Rose have been involved?

The wolf continued as if it had not heard him. “Sometimes such events come in threes. Perhaps when the Wolf speaks you ought to listen.” The Doctor’s body went very still even as a storm darkened his eyes.

“I’m listening.”

“I meant listen to her. I’m just a harbinger, a voice crying out in the wilderness. She will speak to you more directly soon. Still, I can tell you this: pins might hold a rip closed for a time, but only a threaded needle can mend it. If the beast wishes to become a prince again, he should first plant a rose bush in his garden. Forget what you can do and do what you must.”

“You’re speaking in riddles,” complained the Doctor.

The wolf laughed, and the Doctor could not help stepping back.

“Follow the sound of the water to your blue box. Go. Remember, Doctor: the Bad Wolf isn’t coming. She’s already here.”

Despite its huge size, the wolf vanished into the shadows of the forest as completely as if it had never been.

* * *

Physics teaches a truth that is also spiritual: energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed, merely changed.

Rose Tyler died at the beginning of all things. That is undeniable. Yet she did not cease. The universe was built on the foundation of her bones, jumpstarted with her energy, charged with her spirit. The mentions of the Bad Wolf scattered across time and space that the Doctor found on his own were not stray scatterings from her joining with the TARDIS on the Game Station. They were fresh manifestations of the Bad Wolf, who was part of the DNA of the universe from its conception. Rose and the TARDIS-heart she never fully let go were part of all of it, part of every satellite and bowl of alphabet soup.

There was more than just Rose at the beginning, of course. The garden seethed with innumerable serpents right from the start. The universe was built on Daleks and Cybermen too. _ (Listen closely to the last gasping breath of a child struck down by disease, the whip-crack of a slaveholder, the clanking engines of hungry industry devouring life. Wherever there is heartless chance or savage cruelty, you will hear the music of the spheres: a choir singing “exterminate!”) _ Beyond those menaces born within time, there were other things, older things, or at least one beastly Thing. _ (Of that Thing it is wise to speak no more, lest it find you at a crossroads or the jagged edge of the abyss.) _

There were many roads in those woods. That unthinkably dense bundle of everything and nothing at the beginning was mostly substance neither Rose nor Dalek nor Cyberman. But they were there, part of it. The metal men, the angry pepperpots, and the Wolf. Especially the Wolf.

She was there in the bold heart of the aviatrix who dared to soar around the world in a fragile metal shell, crashing into the sea with no regrets, only a faint disappointment that there would be no more horizons after this.

She was there in the barricades in the streets of Paris, the yearning for a better world. (Not long before, in that same land, she had been in the fearless gaze of the aristocrat who stood firm against the clockwork monsters that had stalked her since childhood.)

She rolled with a nomad’s caravan, present in the melancholy and the reckless joy of a life of perpetual motion.

She was there in every laughing gathering of friends and every tender lover’s caress.

She stood and fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.

She was part of every cheek consciously turned to the oppressor’s blow and every hand extended in forgiveness.

She walked around the world, spreading a message of hope with a young woman of dauntless courage and loyalty, and she chanted with the billions of minds that knew they must awake from this nightmare.

She burned in the stars, raged through the plasma storms, and pulled with the black holes. She ate chips and rode the bus with the stupid, mundane, amazing, fantastic throngs of ordinary Londoners.

She slept with the princess in the heart of the thorn-ringed tower.

She was in the wolf’s tender care for pups, its bestial teeth, its lonely howl.

Like a motif drawing together a story or a thread in a red cloak, the Bad Wolf was stitched throughout the universe.

She was in the glowing heart of the Doctor’s TARDIS.

* * *

Hair a study in chaos, face grease-smudged, and hands singed by small sparks, the Doctor was about as content as he could get lately. The TARDIS purred at his attentions. He had lifted up some of the console room’s floor panels to get at the telepathic interface modules, which had been acting up. Languages still translated, but for some reason the aliens all seemed to him like they had outrageous parody-style French accents. It was very distracting to try negotiating a peace treaty between warring nations when both sides sounded on the verge of declaring “I shall now taunt you a second time!”

Now, the relevant circuits laid out before him, he could see the problem was nothing more than built-up dust and grime. How long since he’d cleaned under here? Decades at least. The meditative work of cleaning produced satisfyingly visible results, something all too scarce in his life.

The Doctor lifted up a bundle of wires and spotted an object underneath that wasn’t part of the TARDIS. He picked it up. It was a biscuit, lodged deep in the circuitry of the TARDIS for goodness knows how long. Strangely enough, its texture was still slightly soft, as if it had only recently cooled from the oven. The Doctor sniffed it, shrugged, and took an experimental bite. It tasted like a perfectly ordinary fresh chocolate biscuit.

When he swallowed, everything changed, though he felt no drugs or other internal alterations to his senses. The light within the TARDIS took on a curious clarity. There was a sound like wind in tree branches. A strange scent like honeysuckle with a hint of blood suffused the air. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up, and he knew that something else was present.

“Hello,” said an unforgettable voice.

The Doctor’s hearts seemed to transform into two birds in his chest, battering his ribs with the feathered hammer-blows of their strong wings, rising within him and bearing him upwards with an emotion he refused to name _ (call it the thing with feathers) _. He brutally shut that emotion away.

“I don’t know how you got in my TARDIS or what you are, but I warn you: do _not_ taunt me with this particular apparition. You’re playing with fire,” he said coldly, still facing the outer wall.

“I didn’t think it was possible for you to get more melodramatic,” it said. “Now I owe Mickey five quid if I ever see him.” The voice laughed. The Doctor closed his eyes and just for an instant let that laugh be Rose’s laugh in his mind.

“You can’t be her,” the Doctor insisted when his control was back.

“_Can’t_ is such an ugly word. Almost as bad as ‘never ever.’ Do you remember, Doctor? London, 2012, partying in the streets for the opening ceremony of the Olympics. There were fireworks in the sky. I smelled their gunpowder and a bit of ink scent on you from your time in the drawing. You smelled a storm coming. That night we sat up in the TARDIS library, just talking. I fell asleep on the couch with my head in your lap–a very bony pillow, I’d like to point out. When I woke up, you were looking at me with more attention than I ever thought one living person could give another, especially when the subject of the attention has been drooling in her sleep. For a moment I thought you would kiss me, drool and all, but you didn’t.”

_And regretted it ever since, _ he thought. A dam within the Doctor began to crack. “Rose?”

“Yes.”

The Doctor spun around, but a shout made him wrench to a stop before he could see the source of the voice.

“Stop! Don’t turn around!” For the first time, Rose’s voice sounded worried.

“Why not? Would I see that you’re an imposter after all?” asked the Doctor, tone icy again.

“No. It’s like that story, the Greek one that made me cry. Orifice and what’s her face.”

The Doctor took a second to translate. “Orpheus and Eurydice? If I turn around, you vanish?”

“Yeah, them. I won’t precisely vanish, but it’s not easy to gather myself together enough to speak in just my own voice. I don’t know if we’ll have another chance.”

“Rose, how are you here? If you’re here at all, I mean. Is this a transmission? You aren’t blowing up a sun, are you? Because the trick I pulled to say goodbye is not exactly the best thing for the structural integrity of the universe, and without the TARDIS stabilizing…”

“I’m here, Doctor. This universe. Cross my heart.”

“But _how? _ Did one of my other selves rescue you?” The Doctor thought once more of his list of rejected ways to rescue Rose, wondering which one would prove viable after all.

“I should have predicted you’d fancy yourself the huntsman who could slit open the predator’s belly. Did you ever consider that maybe the girl could save herself? Or that she had important business in the belly of the wolf? Still, there may be call for a hero yet. If the wolf huffed and puffed its own walls down, it will need someone with thumbs to help it rebuild.”

“Rose, I’ve had enough riddles lately out of everything from forest animals to Scrabble tiles. How long have you been here?” he asked, hoping a different question would get a straighter answer.

“I’ve always been here.” Rose’s voice sounded slightly dreamy for this last announcement.

“I don’t understand,” protested the Doctor.

“No, you don’t,” Rose said, “though that’s your own fault. You were careless tinkering with your memory so soon after a regeneration. You needed to forget me, of course, but with your brain still so unbalanced from the brand new neurochemistry, plus the War of course, you lost some knowledge that would have helped you understand now, important knowledge about the end of the Time War and the nature of the universe.”

“Help me remember,” he said, even though a part of him shied away from remembering anything to do about the War, even for Rose’s sake. (But what about the War could possibly explain Rose speaking in his TARDIS now?)

“You were wrong when you told me about the Void, back at Canary Wharf. You didn’t mean to lie to me, but you’d forgotten so much you didn’t understand it yourself. It’s not hell, not emptiness. More or less the opposite, in fact. It’s everything. There’s no time as you understand it in the Void because it’s before time.”

“There’s no such thing as before time,” the Doctor replied automatically.

“That’s what you told the Beast. You were wrong then too–I ran into him in the Void, in fact–but don’t feel bad about it. You only have this false belief ‘cause of your overenthusiastic attempt to forget where we first met.”

_Why did I try to forget Henrick’s basement?_, the Doctor thought. Luckily for his dignity as a genius, he realized she meant some other meeting before asking aloud.

Rose continued: “People look at the matter around them and think it’s solid, but it’s really a few eensy-weensy particles zooming around through a lot of empty space. You think that before the universe everything was packed together infinitely densely, but if you look at it from within there’s plenty of space. Space enough for woods. Space enough to tell a story. Maybe a story about an immortal hero. Maybe a story about a war. Certainly a story about a girl…or a wolf.”

“The Void is between _and_ before. I had forgotten,” the Doctor said, his blood running cold. Other knowledge lay in the shadows just past the edges of his consciousness. “You must have got into it from Pete’s World.”

“Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl, and a wolf, and a quest. You know this story. You’re part of it, but even before that it was a part of you. The true stories are a part of everyone. Do you understand?”

“You made it home via the void, existing here but not intact. You’re in pieces across the universe.” The Doctor tried to feel Rose’s touch in the brush of circulating air against the back of his hand, wishing for her fingers. “That’s what all those Bad Wolf references have been trying to tell me all along.”

“Give the man a medal! A very small medal, because it took you an awfully long time.” He could imagine Rose’s tongue peeking between her teeth as she spoke. She seemed slip strangely back and forth between young London shopgirl and some enigmatic oracle mode. He supposed he couldn’t blame her, considering.

“Oh, Rose. I am so, so sorry. You should have stayed with your family, living a human life.”

“I couldn’t stay. I made my choice and got caught in the plot of this story long ago. I don’t regret a moment of it. Besides, you must have an awfully low opinion of the universe to think that becoming one with it is such a horrible thing. Has doing without me really damaged your faith so much?”

“I…” the Doctor began, but trailed off. Perhaps she was right. Nevertheless, he didn’t want some mystic Rose scattered throughout the universe. He wanted her fingers interlacing with his, warm, solid, and oh so human.

“I know,” said Rose, sadly. “It’s not what I set off looking for either. But Doctor, every story looks like a tragedy if you stop telling it at the wrong time.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you.” The Doctor’s hands clenched into fists.

“It’s never been about what can be. Listen, Doctor. Once there was a princess named Briar Rose. She loved beautiful things and longed to create them with spindles and needles and looms. Her family tried to keep her from all such things, because they knew the prophecy that if she ever pricked her finger on a spindle she would die. But Briar Rose followed her destiny. She pricked her finger and seemed to die. Thorns grew up all around the tower where she lay. But she wasn’t dead, was she Doctor? She was sleeping, her consciousness stuck amongst the thorns.”

“That’s just a fairy tale,” the Doctor reminded her gently.

“Just a fairy tale? Pete Tyler was _just_ an ordinary man, but when he didn’t meet his fate it was enough to destroy the world. Now, pay attention,” Rose insisted. “Real boys do not as a rule come from puppets, but a wish upon a star might create exceptions. A block of stone is not a woman, not even when it’s carved into a statue of one, unless, that is, the sculptor loves it enough.”

“Just a few moments ago you couldn’t remember the names of Orpheus and Eurydice, but all of a sudden you’re full of literary allusions. You were never this cryptic before,” the Doctor protested.

“I was never attempting to pull myself together from within the time vortex, the atoms of the universe, and the collective unconscious before,” Rose shot back. “As I start losing coherency, knowledge from outside seeps in. It’s not easy being an archetype.”

“No, I imagine not.” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, thinking hard. There was meaning here, if he knew how to interpret. He didn’t, and there was no time. “So, does that outside knowledge give you any idea what we do next?”

“If I told you everything, it would make a pretty lousy story, wouldn’t it? Now, close your eyes.” Rose’s voice was light and teasing, but it never occurred to him to disobey. He closed his eyes.

Suddenly, without a sound of feet or the brush of air stirred by movement, he felt lips against his. They were warm, soft, slightly moist, and they felt exactly like Rose’s lips as he remembered from when Cassandra had used Rose’s body to kiss him, though this kiss was feather-light and quite chaste. They didn’t taste like Rose, though. Nothing so human. The lips that pressed so gently against his tasted of stardust, honeysuckle, and blood.

The unseen lips broke the kiss, but the Doctor felt the weight of a forehead leaned against his.

“I love you,” declared Rose.

“I…” the Doctor started, hoping he could manage what he could not on the beach, but Rose placed a finger against his lips.

“Shh,” she whispered. “Tell it to my face.”

The Doctor opened his eyes. No sign of Rose. The light and sounds of the TARDIS returned to normal.

He knew what to do.

* * *


	6. Awakening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Getting Rose back is not as straightforward as defeating a dragon, if it's possible at all.

_Sometimes people leave you  
Halfway through the wood.  
Do not let it grieve you,  
No one leaves for good.  
You are not alone.  
No one is alone._  
\- Finale, _Into the Woods_

_That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying "As you wish," what he meant was, "I love you."_  
-The Princess Bride

* * *

It was not as straightforward as defeating a dragon–depending, of course, on the dragon. On the planet Elallio, the epic of the fabled Prince Quen tells how he defeated a dragon by challenging it to a contest of exceedingly complex calculus problems. Most scholars hold that this is a metaphor written to illustrate the Elallions’ high esteem for logic and critical thinking over emotions or brute strength. The Doctor disagreed with the scholars. After all, he had been referee for the famed contest and knew (a) it really happened and (b) the dragon let Prince Quen win because he was tired of the captive princess’s whining. The point is this: the Doctor’s quest for Rose did not involve dragons.

You could say that the Doctor used sympathetic magic to conjure the whole based on a part. You could say he journeyed into dark caves to find the amulets needed for his spell. You could say that he built himself a maiden like a fairy changeling from inanimate materials.

You could say that the Doctor used a sample of Rose’s blood, stored in the depths of the TARDIS medical freezer after some long-ago medical checkup, to extract her DNA. You could say that he visited shady planets with extremely lax bioethics laws to procure the equipment needed to grow a clone to full adult size in a mere forty days. (He knew ways to grow a human body almost instantaneously, but they all either required full transmat biodata or, designed for manufacturing expendable soldiers, created a body with substantially shortened potential lifespan.)

The second narrative is the way the Doctor would have explained his actions; it is not necessarily truer.

The stories converge on this: one body of Rose Tyler in a sleep hardly distinguishable from death. Computers taught its brain to make the body breathe, keep the heart beating, maintain its temperature (significantly below that of a conscious human), and process the nutrients that came in through tubes. Those computers also kept its brain too deeply asleep to develop further on its own. The body looked just like Rose down to the last detail (the Doctor had even dressed it in Rose’s pajamas and clumsily bleached its hair in case it proved important for the body to match Rose’s self-image), but it was not her. It was a Rose-shaped garment, entirely unworn.

Growing the clone had taken considerable technical expertise, but it was not an endpoint. The breathing meat with Rose’s face pained the Doctor far more than her complete absence. The body did not smile or shout or wander off. He could use the machines from the planets that grew clones as pleasure-slaves to program a personality into the body, but it would not be Rose. He could even awake it and raise it like a baby, allowing it to develop its own selfhood. It would have Rose’s genes, and thus would be beautiful and clever and good-natured, and he would probably like the resulting person, but it would not be his Rose.

A Rose is a Rose by any name, but not without Jackie Tyler’s upbringing, the longing for the father she never really knew, the scars left by Jimmy Stone, the camaraderie with Mickey, the gritty vibrancy of London, and the moment a man in a leather jacket grabbed her hand and said “Run!” His Rose had died ending the Time War in the Big Bang, but the Doctor still had hope of retrieving her.

Death had not obliterated Rose. Hers was not an ordinary death where the consciousness vanishes or passes into some undiscovered country or whatever it is that happens to most people who die. Dying at the beginning of all things, the atoms of Rose’s body were part of the matter of the new universe, and her–her what? dare he call it her soul?–was similarly spread through the universe like salt in the waters of the ocean. Strengthened by the remnants of the Bad Wolf that he hadn’t fully purged, Rose retained just enough selfhood to pass him messages. Now he merely had to disentangle her from everything else in existence without destroying either the universe or Rose. If he could manage that extraction, his real, original Rose, all memories and personality intact, could take up residence in the new body. It was as simple as a miracle.

The heart of the TARDIS was the key. The time vortex was like a spider’s web anchored to everything in spacetime or the ocean in which all things floated. That infinite connectivity was what allowed the TARDIS to travel anywhere. Rose once looked into the heart of the TARDIS and said it looked back. The TARDIS remembered what she saw. His marvelous ship could reach all through the linkages of the vortex and, he hoped, recognize and reassemble the scattered shards of Rose, even changed as she was from the nineteen year-old who first became the Bad Wolf. If there was any way to distill a purely human Rose from the rest of the universe, it was through the TARDIS.

The Doctor gently brushed the body’s eyes open. The basic brain programming he installed in the body would make them blink often enough to prevent damage, but aside from that they would not close until he closed them himself–or Rose did. He ran one final check on the TARDIS systems to make sure everything would open and, just as importantly, shut again. He lifted the body’s torso into a sitting position on the trolley and turned its head to face the console. Finally, he tied a strip of black silk across his own eyes. Rose needed to see into the Vortex, but he dared not risk the temptation of that power. Preparations complete, he pointed the sonic screwdriver at the console and pressed a button.

The TARDIS opened; he heard her song. Wind rushed through the closed room. The air fizzed with power.

In his arms, Rose’s body remained still.

Throwing caution to the winds, the Doctor took one arm away from Rose’s body to tear his blindfold off, keeping his back to the console and its bewitching light. He needed to see so he could try additional measures. The Doctor tilted the body’s head this way and that. He brought it close enough to the console to touch. He closed the body’s eyes and opened them again. The body breathed shallowly and infrequently; its skin was colder than his own. The TARDIS was alive and well, but Rose remained stubbornly inanimate.

So. Rose was lost to him except, perhaps, for cryptic messages scattered across the universe like shapes in tea leaves. It was an impossible plan from the start. He should have never got his hopes up.

The Doctor knew he needed to close the TARDIS and clean up after this mistake. He had an uninhabited body that needed disposal (or more likely storage–the thought of destroying this object that looked so like Rose turned his stomach even when he knew it was just so much meat). Instead he just stood beside the trolley, backlit by the shimmering beauty of the heart of the TARDIS that he must not look at directly, embracing Rose’s unresponsive form and rocking slowly back and forth.

Something poked into his chest. The Doctor winced and slid a hand up to check his pocket. The dimensional transcendence of the pockets of this damn blue suit had never worked properly. Things kept slipping out. In this case, a large sewing needle was sticking out of the top and stabbing him.

Needles. Symbols of domesticity, binding, pain, women, healing, sharpness, narrow passages…and of sex. “Will you take the path of needles or the path of pins?” the werewolf asked the girl. Of course the Doctor knew the story. _(“Elle avoit vû le loup.” She’d seen the wolf–antiquated French slang for loss of virginity.)_

Humans are quick to see innuendoes everywhere. It annoyed the Doctor sometimes. Not every story is about sex or romance. But some are.

The princess Briar Rose pricked her finger (not on a needle but on a spindle, another woman’s tool for working with thread) and slept for a century. It was not enough for the prince to win his way into her chamber and draw open the curtains. A kiss might do the trick here too, though not a kiss alone.

The vortex, he realized, would not reach outward to animate Rose by itself any more than it would animate the couch or the sonic screwdriver. Though the TARDIS was sentient and independent, she would not use her might for something so different from the normal mission of a time machine _except_ in symbiosis with another mind. The Doctor had to look into the heart of the TARDIS, take up the power, guide it to draw forth Rose’s consciousness and place that consciousness within the waiting body, and release the power afterwards.

It would be possible to do so much more with that power: help others, kill the monsters, and keep safe the ones he loved. That is how it would begin. The immensity of the power could all too easily undermine all his best intentions. Appearing too precious to let go, it could turn him into a tyrant, an avenging angel. He might lose his selfhood or destroy the universe. The possibility of such temptation made him tremble with fear. Rassilon, he’d prefer Daleks over this danger to his soul.

It was for Rose. He’d done it before. (_But that was only receiving power still bound by Rose’s innocence and releasing it immediately. This task would require using the power. Would it still be possible to resist? _ he asked himself. Right or wrong, he shushed the doubts.) He would not trade the universe for Rose, but he believed that for Rose’s sake he could keep the universe safe from himself. It might cost him a regeneration, but that was hardly worth noticing beside the other concerns.

The Doctor turned and gazed into the light at the heart of the TARDIS. The vortex rushed into him, filling him as if he opened his mouth underwater and found the liquid a richer breath than oxygen. It was intoxicating. He could see everything. He could do anything. Anything at all, but all he did was to call Rose’s name across the cosmos. The only thing he didn’t know was whether she answered. _ (Orpheus and Eurydice: you can’t tell for sure if she follows, and if you try too hard you shall surely lose her.) _

Radiant with power, the Doctor kissed Rose’s cool lips. He kissed her gently, as if she might break. She was so still. Distantly, he realized that if this didn’t work then he would have a difficult task relinquishing the vortex without ripping the universe apart in frustration. _Oh, Rose _.

He thought of their first journey together. Rose had seen her planet burn, nearly died, and learned that he was the last of his kind. It should have sent her running, but all she wanted was to eat chips and hold his hand even tighter than before. He thought of his terrified marvel when he realized that she had rejected his attempt to keep her safe and instead swallowed the time vortex to keep _him_ safe. Earthy and legendary, that was his Rose.

Almost imperceptibly, the lips under his grew warmer. The senses activated by the vortex gave him the sensation of something gathering towards him, into him, and straight through. The power of the vortex began to pour out of him and into her. For one moment more he was pressing his lips against a comatose mouth, then all of a sudden everything changed. Rose began to kiss him back. By all the stars in the heavens, _Rose was kissing him back_. Her kiss was needy, as if he were water and she dying of thirst. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, fever-hot and fierce. He responded in kind, kissing her as if she were rope and he dangling over a precipice.

The Doctor could see all of time and space, all that might be, and it was _beautiful_. He saw straight back to the beginning of the universe when his world had ended. He was kissing Rose there too, just as he was kissing her on the Game Station where she had stopped the Dalek invasion, and he was aware of it all.

The TARDIS seemed to resound with howls, horns, strings, and drums: a song of triumph, a song of creation. The vortex power crackled through Rose and the Doctor, tangling around them as their hands tangled in each others’ hair.

The singing tide of power within the Doctor surged, crested, and fell. The Doctor felt his senses narrow as the vortex passed out of him and into Rose. Terrified that the vortex would destroy her instants after it brought her back, he fought to draw some of that power out of her again. Rose clung to every tendril of power and snatched her lips away.

The Doctor opened his physical eyes. He looked at Rose’s face and saw not his precious girl but the Bad Wolf, primeval power incarnate. She fought savagely against her confinement in the Doctor’s arms and her puny mortal body, twisting and scratching. When he clung to her still, she gave voice to an eerie howl that beckoned him toward the boundless freedom of wilderness and the exhilaration of unrestrained strength. He ignored the call, whispering lullabies as he hugged her closer. Then Rose exhaled, expelling a mist of power back to the TARDIS. She changed.

In Rose’s eyes, the Doctor saw the hungry, dizzying infinity of Time itself. Phosphorescence like a will-o-the-wisp shimmered around her skin, bewitching, heartless, and deadly. His every instinct said to flee as he’d fled from the vortex when he’d looked into it as a child, but instead he embraced her, though she froze him like the cold after the last star sputtered out. At last she sighed out shimmering energy and changed again.

The light from Rose was slightly less uncanny, but it shone all the brighter. Rose burned with the fire of a sun. A passionate tangle of wordless emotions flared against his mental shields. She singed his skin and mind, but the Doctor held fast and burned with her.

At last Rose exhaled a final flame of power. The remaining glow settled into her skin and vanished. The TARDIS console closed. Rose’s eyes sparkled only with the liveliness of human intelligence (and perhaps a faint dusting of gold in their depths, but it was not too much more than the gold he’d pretended not to see there since the Game Station.) Her body and mind were just as they should be, not bound to a terrible immortality. The Bad Wolf slept.

Rose Tyler was alive, awake, and smiling at him. It was just too much for even a phenomenally advanced brain like his to fully process, so he acted on instinct and kissed her again. This was just a kiss, not a spark of vortex to be seen. However, it was just a kiss in the same way that the Doctor was just another traveler; it was extraordinary. Overwhelming. Fantastic. Rose pressed her wonderfully alive body against him and kissed him until the Doctor was no longer sure where he ended and she began. At last, worried about Rose’s lack of respiratory bypass system, the Doctor drew back far enough to look at her properly.

Since she was first lost the Doctor had thought of a thousand things to say if he ever saw her again: words to make her laugh, words to tell her how he had missed her, wise words, powerful words. All those words rose up in his throat and got stuck there. His jaw worked up and down, but no sound emerged.

“Hello, Doctor. As ways to wake up go, that just may have beaten breakfast in bed,” Rose declared, saving him from speechlessness.

“What if I made you some breakfast too? Anything you like.” He suddenly grinned wildly. “Even ice cream. Ice cream for breakfast, how about that?”

“Ice cream later today, maybe, but right now I want waffles.” Rose said, looking bemused.

“Waffles! Brilliant choice. Waffles it is, then. Waffles, syrup, a good hot cup of tea, some orange juice, and I love you,” the Doctor blurted out.

“Pardon?” Rose clearly thought her ears were misleading her. The Doctor could have backpedaled, but once his throat became unstuck the words were not about to stop.

“I was never able to say it before, though I must have tried hundreds of times. It just kept coming out as ‘fantastic’ or ‘run’ or ‘pass the salt.’ I kept telling myself that saying it wasn’t important, because you knew, but words matter. Words tell stories, and stories make the world. So listen now to the truest story I’ll ever tell: Rose Marion Tyler, I love you.” A second of silence hung between them as an invisible weight seemed to lift from the entire world.

“I like that story. You can tell it again any time you like,” Rose said, her tender expression giving depth to her joking words. She swung her legs over the edge of the edge of the trolley and tried to stand, but immediately wobbled. Her leg muscles, never before used, balked at supporting her weight. The Doctor steadied her before she could fall. He made a mental note to make sure Rose got some exercise to strengthen those new legs, preferably before they visited anywhere dangerous.

“You couldn’t stop me if you tried, my dear, sweet, fantastic, splendiferous, _beloved_ Rose. Now, since you don’t seem ready for any running for your life just yet, may I carry you to breakfast?” He bent and swept her into his arms, giddy with her presence and the freedom of finally saying what he’d held in for so long.

Rose laughed, and the Doctor couldn’t recall any more glorious sound in all of time and space.

“As you wish,” she proclaimed.

* * *


	7. And So It Came To Pass...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Rose have breakfast and come to terms with some consequences of their pasts and Rose's unusual return.

_“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” _  
\--G.K. Chesterton

* * *

Rose watched the Doctor make breakfast. He capered around the kitchen, brimming over with manic energy like a child on Christmas morning. As he worked he talked at supersonic speed, mostly an improbable anecdote about yet another of his meetings with Shakespeare, this time with someone called Martha Jones. Rose tried to listen, but she found it hard to concentrate. Her attention kept being drawn to the grain of the wood on the scuffed table, the feel of that wood against the pads of her fingers, the bright labels of the food containers, or the scent of the waffle batter. The physicality and intricacy of the world left her astonished and more than a little overwhelmed. As the joyous clarity of her awakening faded, she felt adrift.

How very strange to be sitting in a kitchen, occupying one human body again. She did not precisely remember much about the time between helping the Doctor end the Time War and awaking in the console room, but she was aware of it. Unlike the first time she’d absorbed the vortex, she understood perfectly what had happened. Presumably that awareness was a consequence of how her mind had crystallized out of the vortex this time, not tried to contain it. The Doctor hadn’t regenerated since she was the last one with the hot potato of power. She hadn’t died since there was enough of the deadly glory of the vortex absorbed within herself to let her release the rest safely. Now that she was more settled within herself, however, Rose knew that she was almost entirely a normal human. Still, she recalled a sense of immensity. Her skin felt confining.

Rose took a sip of tea. She’d done so much in her quest to find the Doctor, but in the end he’d had to rescue her. She used to love that the Doctor would always come to get her, but part of her wished she’d been strong enough to make it all the way on her own this time.

And now it was over. All that suffering, all that grandeur, and she ended up in a kitchen having breakfast. It was all so _domestic_. She told herself that it would feel more natural in time, but she wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought she saw trees out of the corner of her eyes or heard the whispers of the hostile woods at the edge of her hearing. Sometimes when she spoke her voice stumbled over the words and she felt a howl would come easier.

How do you leave the woods when they have grown up within you?

“Rose? Did you hear me?” asked the Doctor. He must have asked a question.

Rose examined the Doctor. His expression was full of concern. When she studied his eyes, she could see the hard toll of the time since she’d been gone layered on top of the 900-odd (usually VERY odd) years he’d lived before that. That gentle concern was backed by an implicit promise that he would shift planets and face down armies for her sake.

The bowl of waffle batter cradled in his arms didn’t invalidate his status as the Oncoming Storm. Just because he’d finally said “I love you” didn’t make him one iota less magical. He was her Doctor, her true love, the fulfillment of the quest.

The Doctor had held the Time Vortex for her. It wasn’t a rescue, not really. She’d been fine, even if rather lacking in self-awareness and technically dead. However, the Doctor’s part was necessary to reach the final goal, and rightly so. A partnership couldn’t be one-sided, no matter which side was which. Though she’d walked many miles in solitude, the quest was ultimately not hers but theirs.

For better or worse, she’d chosen long ago to abide in the woods. Even the deepest woods may contain shelters where a traveler can rest for a time, but the lull is all the sweeter because it is temporary. Though they had been remade without calluses, her feet belonged to the journey, and her hand to the one who journeyed beside her.

“Sorry. My mind was elsewhere. I was hoping you could come over here,” she said.

“Do you need something? I can get you more tea.”

Rose lurched to her shaky new fawn-legs and boldly draped her arms over the Doctor’s shoulders. “I have plenty of tea, but I could do with another kiss.”

The Doctor honored her request thoroughly. Rose let him kiss away all her uncertainties. This was where she belonged, body and soul.

“You’re an easy woman to provide for,” he told her, grinning smugly.

“Don’t think this gets you out of making me waffles.” Rose suddenly realized that she was hungry.

* * *

“There we are, locked in a broom closet with a bomb two minutes from blowing up, and there’s a dozen angry weasels in there with us. I turn to Kara, and I say, ‘It’s probably just as well this is a confidential mission, because I would hate for death by weasel and explosion to be in my obituary.’ I’m grinning, of course, ‘cause what else are you gonna do? She looks at me like I’ve gone completely bonkers. She says, ‘Do you honestly find this situation humorous, Agent Tyler?’” Rose told the Doctor over the bowl of ice cream that followed two waffles, affecting a posh accent for her Torchwood partner. “That’s when I decided to stop trying to make myself accept the other world and start listening to what my heart had been telling me the whole time. I belong here, with you. _You_ would have known that the proper response in that situation was…”

“ ‘Actually, this is the kind of obituary I’ve always wanted’,” the Doctor offered. Rose laughed.

“Good one, but even better would have been, ‘they could write about the weasels just as long as they don’t mention my nudity’.” Rose smirked.

The Doctor spurted the sip of tea he’d rather foolishly taken across the table. “_No! _ You were naked?”

“We were! I finally had a naked story to match the ones Jack used to tell, and the only person with me completely didn’t appreciate it. I thought I would die of frustration before the bomb had a chance to get me.” Rose smiled for a moment, but her mirth faded.

“Speaking of Jack, I ran into him in the Void. Turns out he goes there for a little while every time he dies.” Rose watched the Doctor as she spoke. He seemed surprised by the meeting in the Void, but the mention of Jack’s repeated dying only made the Doctor look everywhere but at her face.

“So you remember being in the Void? After how I got you back, that’s surprising. What about afterwards?”

“The Void I remember bits of quite well, although it doesn’t feel entirely like it happened to me. After the proper universe started up my memory gets fuzzy, mostly just emotions without reference point and a pounding headache if I try for more. I don’t think the history of the universe fits in my thick ape skull. But you just changed the subject, Doctor. Why did you leave Jack?”

The Doctor hesitated, but he answered her. “A Time Lord has senses humans don’t. When he became immortal, he became a fixed point in time. It grated on those senses, like fingernails on a blackboard.” The Doctor fidgeted, twirling the sonic screwdriver between his fingers. Rose reached out and took it from him, stilling his hand.

“When I made him immortal, you mean. I know my part in this. Doctor, couldn’t you have put up with it for long enough to explain the problem and drop him off somewhere other than a satellite full of bodies?” Rose had no anger, guilt, or accusations in her voice, just an iron demand for the truth.

The Doctor met Rose’s gaze, and his brown eyes were full of shadows. “Tolerate his fixedness for that long, yes. Explain, no. What happened to Jack…however kindly it was meant, it was no blessing. I couldn’t face explaining that to either of you.”

“Did it ever occur to you that _he_ should be the one to determine that?”

“Maybe. Eventually. Rose, abandoning Jack was not my best decision, I admit that, but he and I have already discussed it. It’s done, and he and I are both old enough to accept that.”

“You got back in contact with Jack?” Rose leaned back in her chair, surprised.

“Stranded at the end of the universe with each other, held captive together for a year…that sort of thing. I’ll tell you about it, but it’s a long and not very happy story. I’d rather keep this day clear of that, if you don’t mind waiting.” When Rose nodded, the Doctor continued. “At the end of it I offered him a space on the TARDIS. He refused. Apparently he’s acquired his own personal Scooby gang and prefers their company to mine.” The Doctor spoke somewhat too casually to be entirely believable.

“Hmmm. I still miss him. I want to try changing his mind, but we can let him have a bit of time doing his own thing before I get persuasive. It’s strange, though, that he turned you down. When I met him, he was so intent on tracking you down that he was carrying your severed hand in his saddlebag in the Void _and_ as a tracking device in this world. A severed hand as a memento–how creepy is that?”

The Doctor looked shifty. Rose saw his demeanor and raised her eyes to the ceiling.

“Please tell me you don’t have the severed hand.”

In answer, the Doctor rose momentarily to open a cupboard that used to contain an immense selection of condiments from across time and space. Instead, it contained a clear case with a severed hand suspended in liquid.

“You have your own severed hand in your kitchen. Doctor, why?!”

“It used to be in the console room, but I moved it when I started growing a body there for you,” said the Doctor, as if that explained everything.

“Only room for one bizarre Frankenstein mad-science project in there?”

“You are NOT a mad-science project, Rose. You’re alive, human, and completely yourself,” the Doctor said with sudden intensity, reaching over the table to take Rose’s hand.

Rose squeezed the Doctor’s hand in reassurance. “I know. I trust you not to bring me back as anything less than whole. Other than being a bit weak, I feel like myself. Still, it’s a bit strange, knowing that my body was grown in a vat. Look at this!” Rose swung a foot onto the table. “Last thing I remember clearly, I’d just walked my feet to bloody tatters in the woods. Now there’s not so much as a callous. Or look here on my hand, where I was bit by a weasel in that closet. Used to be a scar, but there’s no sign of it. I’m in mint condition.”

“Oh, really?” said the Doctor with a sudden dangerous smile. “I think you need a Doctor’s examination to test that out.”

The Doctor took her hand and studied it with intense concentration, stroking his fingers over every inch. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to the spot on her palm where the scar once was. Then he repeated the performance with her feet, massaging them before kissing every toe and the baby-soft soles. Rose’s head tilted back appreciatively.

“Let’s see. If I remember correctly, you had a small scar on your ear from a failed ear-piercing experiment with Shareen.” He knelt beside Rose’s chair, brushing her hair back and then pressing a feather-soft kiss to the ear. Abruptly his tongue darted out to lick the folds of her ear. The Doctor was rewarded with Rose’s sudden intake of breath.

“Now,” he said, close enough to her ear that she felt the puffs of his breath, deliciously cool against the dampness left by his tongue, “do you have any other former scars that need examining?”

Rose smiled languidly as she pondered. Suddenly she sat bolt upright, pressing a hand to her mouth.

“Oh my God! Doctor, are unicorns real?” she said anxiously.

“What?!” asked the Doctor, utterly baffled.

“Lots of things I used to think were imaginary turn out to be real. If unicorns exist, we need to go and see them. Now.” She enunciated very clearly, but the Doctor still didn’t understand a thing she was saying.

“What?”

“My body’s back to starting condition. _All over_. Unicorns prefer…”

“…virgins,” the Doctor finished. He had the expression of someone who’s just discovered what the unidentified exotic dish he was devouring actually contained while in the company of the hosts who must not be offended.

His mind raced. What did Rose want him to _do_ with this information? Was a regrown hymen a positive or negative thing to her? The twenty-first century had such complicated and bizarre attitudes about sex. Saying the wrong thing could upset or offend her. Did she want to wait on the physical side of their newly expanded relationship? What if she wanted to break in her replacement body with a fellow human? Was he being presumptive to assume that she wanted sex with him at all? Her chaste company would be infinitely better than her absence and unquestionably worth every bit of his effort, but he’d hoped for something different.

A pun. He needed to make a pun.

“Rose, I do believe you’ve been reflowered!” the Doctor declared.

Rose dissolved into giggles.

“I’m the embodiment of a Madonna song!” she said when she had the breath for it.

“I think I have a chastity belt stashed in the wardrobe room so we can protect your new status,” the Doctor informed her with exaggerated solicitousness.

“You own a chastity belt? Why? On second thought, I don’t want to know. Just keep it away from me,” Rose said. The Doctor breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“Should I increase the number of goats I pay to your father for the privilege of your company should we ever discover a way to send livestock across the Void?”

Rose rolled her eyes. “Whatever. A little membrane doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been with other men, and it doesn’t change a thing between us. I’m yours now and you’re mine. Our first time with each other would have been just as special in any version of my body...or your body, for that matter. Can’t say I’m thrilled about this side effect of coming back, but I walked across the Void on bloody feet to get to you. I think I can handle first-time pain a second time.”

“Rose Tyler, have I ever told you how astonishing you are?”

“Not within the past five minutes, so feel free to say it again. But Doctor, I really do want to know about the unicorns. Are the legends true? And if they are, will physical virginity be enough or do my memories disqualify me?”

“The inhabitants of Valamith Alpha bear a remarkable resemblance to Earth’s legends of unicorns, but they couldn’t care less about a person’s virginity.”

“Right, then. Unicorns tomorrow. Jack some time soon. Today we stay in the TARDIS.”

“Whatever you desire, fair maiden.”

“I think you know what I desire,” said Rose in a voice that sped his double-pulse up several notches.

“Spell it out for me,” the Doctor said, helping her to her feet and pulling her body against his.

“You and me, Doctor. Together. All the way down the path of needles,” Rose said. They kissed.

_ (In and out, in and out, needle and thread, woman and man. There is piercing and there is binding. The storm breaks over the wolf, and the wolf turns its head to the sky, soaked and howling in delight at the thunder. An ancient fairy tale is told anew.) _

  
* * *


	8. Happily Ever After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old friends and ever after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> During the visit to VJ Day in Times Square, the famous photo mentioned is [this one](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%E2%80%93J_day_in_Times_Square).

_“Not only are there no happy endings,” she told him, “there aren’t even any endings.”_  
-Neil Gaiman, _American Gods_

* * *

“Well, that was unexpected,” Jack said to the white horse when it nudged him to consciousness in the woods. “Still, I suppose with the Rift constantly bringing in people from other times I shouldn’t be _that_ surprised that I died at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. Can you call it an Inquisition if there’s just the one priest and a guard?”

The horse pawed the ground. Jack decided to interpret that as a yes.

“That’s my opinion too. It just sounds much better than saying I was killed by a pair of confused, temporally-displaced Spaniards with nothing but a large knife and the element of surprise. Bet I can surprise them just as much when I get back. Then they’ll really think I’m a witch.” Jack climbed to his feet and dusted off his cloak. He grabbed the pommel of the saddle, but before he could mount he suddenly noticed the change in the woods.

The ominous bare trees were gone. In their place, the forest floor was blanketed with greenery and tree seedlings reaching about as high as his waist. As he watched, wildflowers burst into bloom and the seedlings unfurled spring-green leaves. Somewhere in the distance, a bird sang.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he declared. The horse tossed its head, dislodging a butterfly from its nose.

Jack climbed aboard and rode off slowly, taking in the sights. By the time he left the woods and returned to the living, the verdant trees were as high as his mounted eye and still growing.

* * *

Jack awoke to the smell of rubbish, the feel of concrete underneath him, and the wondrous sound of the TARDIS materializing. His eyes shot open. The Inquisition was nowhere to be seen–he must have been out for longer than usual this time–but the familiar blue box was flashing into existence just past his feet in the dingy alley. Joy and worry combined to set Jack’s pulse racing. The door opened and the Doctor emerged in a flood of light.

“Doctor! This is unexpected. Is the world ending or something?” Jack said, rising to his feet. He knew far too well that the Time Lord wasn’t the sort to pay social calls.

The Doctor beamed, that marvelous, shining, everybody lives grin he so rarely had occasion to wear. “Or something.”

Out of the TARDIS stepped Rose Tyler. _Rose Tyler! _ Though the light spilling from the TARDIS illuminated her hair like a halo, she seemed as solid as the ground under his feet. Jack stared. He glanced at the Doctor, who somehow managed to grin even more broadly. Without quite knowing how he got there, suddenly Jack had Rose in his arms and was spinning her around in a giddy circle.

“He found you,” Jack said in wonderment as he set her down. “Or did you find him, clever Rose?”

“Little of both. It’s quite a story. You’re in it, actually, but I don’t think you remember yet. I’ll tell it to you if you like, but first I need to ask you something. Do you wanna come with us?” Rose asked with hopeful eyes.

Jack’s smile fled. To say he wanted to go with them was the greatest understatement of his considerable lifetime, but he couldn’t abandon Torchwood again. His team still needed him.

“It doesn’t have to be now,” the Doctor said gently, evidently reading the conflict on Jack’s face. “That’s the beauty of having a time machine. Rose and I can skip ahead while you take the slow path for a while. Whether you need three years or forty or a hundred, we’ll keep coming back until you’re ready or until you tell us to get out of your life.”

“Oh, yes.” Jack stumbled over his words. “I mean yes, I’ll come with you eventually, not yes, get out of my life. Stay in my life. Both of you.” He grabbed a hand from each of them, the Doctor and his miraculous Rose.

“Count on it,” Rose assured him. She beamed at him _ (and my! What a gorgeous smile she had!) _

“Quite right, too,” said the Doctor. Jack wasn’t quite sure why that remark made Rose kick the Time Lord’s pinstriped shin.

“Ouch!” protested the Doctor half-heartedly. “Now, Jack, we owe you a story to explain this.”

“And I promised to remind you of something,” said Rose, and Jack was quite intrigued by the inviting look she gave him.

“We’ll get to that, Rose. It starts like this: once upon a time there was a girl who was also a wolf…”

Somewhere in the distance, a clock tolled midnight. His companions’ hands fit with Jack’s hands like feet in perfect shoes. All was right with the world.

And so it came to pass that the girl known as the Bad Wolf, the Time Lord called the Oncoming Storm, and the immortal Captain were reunited at last. When his business on earth was as finished as it could ever be, Jack joined them on their starry road, which was wild and perilous but no longer lonely. There followed a great deal of dancing, a great deal of running, and eventually a fair amount of heroics (for the Doctor had not forgotten the giant wolf’s warning that events often come in threes). The three traveled the universe together, and the TARDIS rang with their laughter. They all lived happily ever after.

* * *

_They lived happily ever after. _

Such tales are supposed to end with happily ever after, but how could this one? With all the peril and dungeons and days when hardly anybody lived, how could you call their life together happy? With Rose in a fragile, fast-decaying human body and even the Doctor a long way from invulnerable, how could they claim forever? For time travelers, even the “after” posed problems.

This tale cannot end with happily ever after. Except…

On VJ day in Times Square, a photographer snapped a picture of a sailor and a nurse kissing that became famous, but if he had turned around and walked twenty feet he would have seen a man in a pinstriped suit and a bleach-blond woman joined in a kiss that put the other celebrants to shame. Beside them, a man in a long wool coat watched them with a million-dollar smile.

Only these three knew that the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki days earlier had woken something ancient, reptilian, and evil that had slept under the seas, and only they knew that just one hour ago the survival of the Earth, perhaps the universe, had depended on Jack and Rose’s ability to sing for long enough to keep the monster lulled to sleep while the Doctor made a technologically advanced device out of the materials on hand: a toaster, a broken radio, and some chewing gum. The corners of Rose’s eyes bore the faint beginnings of crows’ feet, and the open neck of the Doctor’s shirt revealed the tip of a long, old scar down his chest that would not heal further until he regenerated, but they were giddy as teenagers.

He dipped her, right there in the crowds that celebrated another victory entirely, and kissed her until they both lost track of the way the universe was turning. When at last they stood and unlocked their lips, Jack grabbed the Doctor’s shoulders and spun him around suddenly. Before the Doctor had a chance to speak (a very short interval indeed) Jack kissed the Doctor with a dip every bit as dramatic as the Doctor had given Rose moments earlier. Such a display from two men would normally have attracted hostile attention, but most passers-by were so elated by the war’s end that there was no room in them to bother with hatred. The few who did stop to stare soon hurried along, having seen something in Rose’s smile that went straight to the primitive back of their brains and sent them on their ways, glancing nervously over their shoulders. When Jack released the Doctor, the three practically skipped back to the TARDIS. Look at this moment and a thousand others and see if you dare deny them “happily.”

On a planet called New Walla Walla, in the year 4529, Rose just smiled and shook her head when Count Jojo asked if the Doctor was her son. She gave up getting angry about that question years ago. Her legs were still strong enough to run, although if they figured out in time that the problems at a given stop would require a particularly athletic solution she would often stay in the TARDIS and offer advice to the Doctor and Jack via an earpiece. Rose made sure the earpieces had no off switches on the away team’s end. On matters of court intrigue like this, however, she was the trio’s most valuable asset. She looked trustworthy, harmless, ignorable, until all of a sudden the light shifted and revealed that granny had very sharp teeth indeed.

When the Count raised his eyebrow to enquire what they were if not parent and child, the Doctor put an arm possessively around Rose’s shoulders. Rose fluffed the Doctor’s hair, now featuring five gray strands, and pinched his bum. The Count’s shocked expression made them giggle like children. Jack was supposed to be flirting with the Countess Fifi for information, but he quite ruined his suave act by catching their giggles from across the room. This is “after,” and it is still fantastic.

Much later, on a planet that would not acquire inhabitants sentient enough to name it for another forty million years, the Doctor and Jack lay on their backs in the grass. They lay far enough apart for a narrow set of shoulders to fit in between them, a portrait in negative space. A resplendent canopy of stars stretched over them. Their air smelled of fallen leaves and coming cold. The woods surrounding the meadow where they lay were very quiet.

“Why are we here, Jack?”

“Just look at the sky.”

The Doctor looked. The planet’s peculiar position on the outskirts of a nebula meant that shining lines of dust and gas curled across the sky. As he let his mind quiet, he started to perceive patterns. There was a circle with more circles and lines within it. The Doctor drew in a sharp breath.

“I woke up from that last gunshot knowing to come here and knowing the spot in the sky, but I can’t read it. Care to translate?” Jack said. Since reuniting with Rose and the Doctor years ago, Jack had begun remembering bits and pieces from the woods beyond his deaths.

“I think you know,” the Doctor told him, his face opening up in wonder.

Far away, some animal gave a ululating cry, but it was not a lonely sound. The autumnal air carried the faintest hint of honeysuckle scent. “Bad Wolf” was written across the stars in Gallifreyan. It was not an empty echo.

The universe hates complete destruction but loves metamorphoses and cycles. Now that the Doctor knew that the persistent messages were a signal of love, the words in the sky filled him with peace he hadn’t known these past few empty months. The night was charged with presence. Rose was with him still in a way, as she must be. She always would be. For ever.

_They lived happily ever after. _

* * *


End file.
